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THE 
MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 


THE 
MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

AND  OTHER  ACADEMIC 
PERFORMANCES 


BY 

BARRETT   WENDELL 

Professor  of  English  at  Harvard  College 


THI 
UNIVERSITY 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1909 


•• 


COPYRIGHT,  1909,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

Published  October,  1909 


CONTENTS 

I 

PAGE 
OF  THESE  ACADEMIC  PERFORMANCES  .          3 

II 

THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION    ...          9 

III 

THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE        ...       81 

IV 

THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION  ....     137 

V 

EDGAR  ALLAN  POE      .     .  ...     197 

VI 

DE  PRESIDE  MAGNIFICO        ....     256 


190871 


OF     THESE     ACADEMIC     PER 
FORMANCES 


- 


OF    THf 

UNIVERSITY 


OF     THESE     ACADEMIC     PER 
FORMANCES 

SINCE  the  beginning  of  this  year  1909 
I  have  been  called  on  no  less  than  five 
times  to  speak  before  audiences  gath 
ered  together  on  occasions  of  academic 
solemnity.  Such  performances  are  not 
quite  cheerfully  portentous  either  for 
us  who  take  part  in  them  or  for  those 
who  are  obliged  to  sit  at  our  feet. 
Neither  can  quite  avoid  an  underlying 
assumption  that  they  will  result  in 
little  more  than  fresh  demonstrations 
of  the  hapless  futility  of  sermons.  Yet, 
after  all,  few  circumstances  can  more 
clearly  challenge  one  to  do  one's  best. 

[    3   ] 


ACADEMIC  PERFORMANCES 

This  thought  has  encouraged  me  to 
gather  together  the  results  of  these 
occasional  labours.  They  need  little, 
if  any,  comment.  All  deal  with  mat 
ters  closely  connected  with  American 
university  life.  All  but  one  were  fully 
written  down,  as  well  as  I  could  write 
them,  for  the  purpose  of  sure  delivery. 
It  has,  therefore,  seemed  best  to  send 
them  forth  just  as  they  were  given; 
and,  in  finally  writing  the  address  which 
I  had  delivered  from  notes  last  year  in 
Chicago,  and  repeated,  in  April,  with 
various  modifications,  at  Brown  Uni 
versity,  to  adhere,  as  nearly  as  I  could, 
to  its  original  form.  The  precise  occa 
sion  for  which  each  of  these  perform 
ances  was  prepared  is  stated  at  the 
beginning  of  each.  I  need  add  only 
that  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  poem,  given 
at  Harvard  College,  is  my  first  attempt 
to  express  myself  publicly  in  verse ;  and 


ACADEMIC  PERFORMANCES 

that  I  am  consequently  reminded  of  a 
rhyme  uttered  some  years  ago  by  a 
friend  who  found  himself  in  a  similar 
literary  predicament: 

"Poeta  nascitur,  non  fit — 
And  that's  the  very  deuce  of  it." 


II 

THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 


An  Address  before  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  Society  of 
Johns  Hopkins  University,  24  April,  1909 


II 

THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

MR.   PRESIDENT,   AND   MEMBERS   OF 
THE   PHI  BETA  KAPPA  SOCIETY: 

Of  all  the  honours  which  can  come 
to  an  American  man  of  letters,  none  is 
more  insidiously  flattering  than  such 
an  invitation  as  yours;  for  the  sum 
and  substance  of  a  Phi  Beta  Kappa 
orator's  message  must  always  be  the 
expression  of  his  own  opinion — a  matter 
generally  and  relentlessly  assumed  of 
interest  only  to  himself.  Invited  to 
give  it  to  others,  his  first  acknowledg 
ment  of  the  privilege  must  be  the  ex 
pression  of  humble  and  hearty  thanks 
to  those  whose  goodness  and  loving- 
[  9  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

kindness  have  afforded  him  the  oppor 
tunity.  His  next  must  be  the  perplex 
ing  inquiry  of  what  range  of  opinion  to 
set  forth.  Things  in  general  offer  an 
inconveniently  extensive  field  of  ob 
servation.  Some  corner  thereof,  not  too 
highly  illuminated,  must  evidently  be 
sought;  and  if  that  corner  chance  to 
be  habitually  a  lurking-ground  of  his 
hearers,  as  well  as  of  his  own,  so  much 
the  better  for  everybody.  This  line  of 
exploration  has  brought  me,  without 
much  hesitation,  to  a  region  familiar 
to  us  all.  Your  generous  summons  has 
called  me  from  the  eldest  conservatory 
of  education  in  our  country  to  gladden, 
or  sadden,  a  passing  hour  in  the  history 
of  its  most  luxuriant  seminary.  I  shall 
make  no  further  apology  for  inviting 
your  attention  to  some  opinions  of 
mine  concerning  the  Mystery  of  Edu 
cation. 

[  10  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

For  education,  as  we  know  it  now 
adays,  is  indisputably  a  mystery,  in  the 
full,  baffling  sense  of  that  fascinatingly 
ambiguous  word.  It  is  the  occupation, 
the  trade  if  you  will,  the  metier  or  Tries- 
tier  or  minister iwn,  with  which  the 
waking  lives  of  most  of  us  are  con 
cerned;  and,  furthermore,  there  hovers 
about  it,  impalpable  but  certain,  some 
such  quivering  atmosphere  of  filmy, 
phantasmagoric  glamour  as  made  un 
earthly  to  profane  eyes  the  vanished 
and  impenetrable  mysteries  of  primal 
Greece. 

What  these  were,  one  begins  to 
wonder;  and,  if  one  be  old  enough 
to  have  experienced  the  obstacles  to 
culture  presented  by  despairingly 
thumbed  pages  of  Liddell  and  Scott, 
one  turns,  if  only  from  schoolboy  habit, 
to  see  what  they  have  to  say  about  it. 
v  is  there,  safe  and  sound ;  it 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

proves  to  mean  nothing  more  nor  less 
than  mystery — the  kind  of  thing  im- 
memorially  practised  at  Eleusis,  and 
still  perhaps  vital  to  the  being  of  those 
among  our  fellow-citizens  who  enjoy 
describing  themselves  by  knightly  titles, 
and  walking  about  in  fantastically  uni 
formed  processions.  But  the  saving 
grace  of  Liddell  and  Scott  is  an  absorb 
ing  passion  for  getting  at  the  roots  of 
things,  if  they  can.  So  a  parenthesised 
reference  leads  us  straight  from  Mva-Tijpiov 
to  MUO-T?;? — which  fragment  of  musty 
lore  turns  out  to  signify  one  initiated. 
Even  though  still  nowhere,  we  may 
feel,  we  are  beginning  to  start  on  the 
road  somewhere.  A  mystery  clearly 
involves  initiation;  and  initiation  im 
plies  that,  if  the  mystery  is  to  persist, 
somebody — and,  in  all  likelihood,  al 
most  everybody — has  got  to  be  left 
out.  Furthermore,  to  revert  to  Liddell 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

and  Scott,  the  very  existence  of  the 
substantive  Mvcm?<?  hangs  on  that  of 
the  verb  Mue'eo — to  initiate;  and  this 
calls  to  mind  the  obvious  truth  that  in 
order  to  initiate  anybody  into  anything 
there  must  always  be  somebody  else  to 
perform  the  process  of  initiation.  What 
manner  of  somebody  this  may  be,  Lid- 
dell  and  Scott  finally  proceed  to  inti 
mate.  Mve'o) — to  initiate — they  derive 
from  Mvco,  where  they  leave  us;  and 
MM  they  define  "to  close,  to  shut; 
especially  of  the  lips  and  eyes,  to  wink." 
Mvco  seems  elemental,  at  least  so  far 
as  Liddell  and  Scott  go;  according  to 
them,  it  is  derived  from  nothing  short 
of  the  heart  of  nature.  Wherefore, 
perhaps,  they  freely  permit  themselves 
that  beautifully  imaginative  pregnancy 
of  definition.  As  one  puts  aside  the 
exhausted  volume,  one  can  hardly  help 
reflecting  that  if  we  keep  our  lips  closed 

[    13    ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

and  solemnly  wink  at  one  another,  no 
body  else  need  ever  know  that  we  do 
not  know  all  about  it. 

Some  of  us  do,  perhaps ;  beyond 
question  a  good  many  of  us  talk  as  if 
they  did,  and  write,  and  publish,  until 
less  confident  heads  begin  to  swim  with 
the  sad  self-consciousness  of  compara 
tive  ignorance.  Of  a  few  facts  we  can 
happily  feel  sure.  This  Education — 
with  a  fine,  big  capital  E — is  doubly 
a  mystery:  it  is  not  only  a  trade  or 
occupation,  but,  as  I  pointed  out  a  good 
many  years  ago,  it  is  such  an  object  of 
faith  in  these  United  States  of  Amer 
ica,  and  perhaps  everywhere  else  in 
this  twentieth  century  of  the  Christian 
Era,  that  we  may  fairly  regard  it  as  a 
cult,  almost  as  a  religion.  Those  of  us 
who,  for  better  or  worse,  are  called  on, 
so  far  as  may  be  in  our  power,  to  pre 
serve  and  to  guide  it,  are  charged  with 

[    14   ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

an  office  almost  priestly.  Harvard  is 
not  only  a  conservatory  nor  Johns 
Hopkins  only  a  seminary;  both  are 
sanctuaries.  Membership  of  the  Phi 
Beta  Kappa  consequently  has  its  grave 
side  as  well  as  its  happy;  for  it  marks 
one  special  degree  of  initiation  into  a 
mystery  held  peculiarly  reverend  in  our 
own  time  and  country. 

So  long  as  reverence  preserves  a 
mystery,  initiates  of  any  degree  may 
rest  content.  In  any  venerable  mys 
tery,  however — trade  or  cult — one  great 
virtue  has  always  been  difficulty  of 
access.  Those  who  are  not  admitted 
to  its  secrets,  never  quite  sure  of  what 
the  secrets  are,  hold  them  in  awful 
respect.  Even  though  the  secrets  them 
selves  be  trivial  or  outworn,  too,  the 
fact  that  whoever  attains  them  must 
work  vigilantly,  and  bear  sharp  scrutiny 
makes  the  mere  attainment  a  token  of 

[    15    ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

power;  for  the  masters  are  thus  cho 
sen  by  a  pitiless  process  of  selection — a 
process  favourable  to  the  quality  of  man 
or  beast.  The  moment  the  process 
of  selection  begins  to  relax,  though, 
— the  moment  people  begin  to  attain 
something  which  looks  like  initiation 
without  arduous  effort,  vigorous  con 
centration,  devoted  self-sacrifice, — the 
great  safeguard  of  any  mystery  begins 
to  weaken;  the  mystery  itself,  indeed,  is 
threatened  with  dissipation.  Now,  to 
my  mind,  this  reverend  mystery  of  ours 
is  not  at  present  so  secure  from  dissi 
pation  as  we  are  disposed  comfortably 
to  assume.  A  good  many  facts,  at 
least,  generally  supposed  to  be  tokens 
of  its  enduring  strength,  may  certainly 
be  presented  rather  in  the  light  of 
something  like  symptoms  of  disease. 

The  unprecedented  extension  of  pop 
ular  education  at  public  expense,  for  ex- 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

ample,  is  magnificently  generous.  We 
are  proud  of  our  free  schools,  primary, 
secondary,  and  technical;  of  our  free 
universities,  and  of  our  philanthropic 
schemes  for  bringing  academic  degrees 
by  rural  delivery  to  the  doors  of  la 
bourers,  and  their  sons  and  their 
daughters.  All  the  same,  nobody  can 
deny  that  this  process  does  a  good  deal 
to  make  easy  what  used  to  be  hard,  and 
thus  to  impair  its  moral  value.  Again, 
something  similar  is  true  of  our  public 
library  system.  When  to  learn  German 
in  Massachusetts  a  subsequently  emi 
nent  scholar  had  to  import  both  his  text 
and  his  dictionary,  he  knew  that  they 
were  precious  tools,  with  which  he  set  to 
work  heroically  and  successfully.  Now 
adays,  when  everybody  can  have  such 
things  for  nothing,  people  seem  gener 
ally  disposed  to  regard  them  only  as 
tiresome  playthings.  Still  again,  when 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

school  books  had  to  be  bought,  the 
children  who  owned  them — or  at  worst 
the  parents  of  such  children — were  re 
minded,  if  only  by  the  demand  on  their 
pockets,  that  books  are,  or  ought  to  be, 
objects  of  value.  In  these  new  times, 
when  every  public  school  throughout 
our  country  provides  free  text-books 
as  well  as  free  instruction,  the  pauperi 
zation  of  learning  has  gone  so  far  that 
you  can  hardly  persuade  well-to-do 
undergraduates  at  our  older  colleges  to 
regard  the  expenditure  of  fifteen  or 
twenty  dollars  a  year  for  books  they 
must  study  as  anything  else  than  an 
imposition  on  your  part,  impelling  them 
on  theirs  to  wasteful  extravagance. 

Another  and  a  different  force  at 
present  tending  to  dissipate  our  mys 
tery  may  perhaps  give  rise  to  more 
divergence  of  opinion;  but  whether 
you  welcome  it  or  deplore  it,  you  can- 
[  18  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

not  neglect  it.  A  century  ago,  educa 
tion,  generally  confined  to  men,  en 
joyed  the  kind  of  respect  which  we 
have  been  accustomed,  from  eldest 
time,  to  associate  with  the  conception 
of  virility.  At  present  the  general 
practice  of  coeducation  combines  with 
the  luxuriant  growth  of  colleges,  and 
the  like,  especially  designed  for  women 
— who  mature  earlier  than  men,  and 
consequently  listen  and  recite  some 
what  more  acceptably  than  normal 
males  under  the  age  of  twenty-five — to 
produce  a  latent  suspicion  that  educa 
tion,  if  not  learning,  may  soon  prove 
something  like  what  a  sceptical  Italian 
once  pronounced  the  Catholic  Church 
to  be — cosa  eccellente  per  le  donne.  On 
this  point,  two  observations  occur  to  me ; 
according  to  divers  authorities  the  pres 
ence  of  many  women  in  any  given  kind 
of  classes — such  as  those  in  English 
f  19  1 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

literature — generally  drives  men,  for 
self- protection,  into  other  fields  of  cul 
ture;  and  one  reason  why  may  perhaps 
be  shadowed  in  a  somewhat  frivolous 
comment  on  American  manners  lately 
made  by  an  evidently  unsympathetic 
observer — namely,  that  the  regular  fem 
inine  form  of  the  word  cad  in  the  United 
States  appears  to  be  co-ed. 

That  this  pleasantry,  whatever  you 
may  think  of  its  taste,  is  comprehen 
sive,  nobody  would  pretend.  It  brings 
instantly  to  mind,  in  contradiction,  an 
incident  said  to  have  occurred  not  long 
ago  at  an  American  public  school  for 
girls.  A  skilful  and  devoted  woman 
there  had  long  maintained  in  her 
classes  a  high  standard  of  instruction, 
attested  by  unflinchingly  definite  marks 
or  grades.  The  story  runs  that  a  new 
superintendent  disapproved  her  meth 
ods.  If  in  a  given  class,  for  example, 
[  20  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

no  pupil  displayed  anything  higher 
than  mediocrity,  no  grades  of  special 
commendation  were  returned.  The 
superintendent  directed  her  thereafter 
to  give  the  best  pupil  in  any  class  the 
highest  mark  allowed  by  the  scale — 
one  hundred  per  cent.,  let  us  say — and 
to  grade  the  others  according  to  this 
fortuitous  standard.  The  process  he  is 
understood  to  have  believed  encourag 
ing  to  the  unfortunate  or  the  stupid. 
The  teacher  declined  to  obey  him,  con 
scientiously  holding  that  a  high  grade 
ought  to  certify  high  scholarship.  For 
this  insubordination  she  was  presently 
removed  to  a  position  of  less  dignity. 
In  other  words,  she  was  severely  dis 
ciplined  for  an  attempt  to  maintain  a 
definite  standard  of  attainment.  As 
a  natural  consequence,  the  reports  of 
her  successor  indicated  a  gratifying 
improvement  in  the  quality  of  pupils  at 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

the  school  in  question,  which  made 
almost  everybody  happier;  and,  as  the 
good  woman  with  unpractical  ideals 
happened  to  die  within  the  year,  no 
harm  has  ensued  to  anybody  or  any 
thing  except  this  reverend  mystery  of 
ours.  The  benevolent  lowering  of 
standard  has  perhaps  done  something 
toward  a  local  dissipation  of  its  gla 
mour. 

Now  whether  such  matters  as  these 
seem  portentous  of  better  days  to  come, 
or  of  worse,  we  can  hardly  deny  that 
they  concern  us,  so  far  as  we  are  priests 
of  the  cult  of  education  or  initiates  of 
its  mystery.  Very  likely  the  mystery 
had  grown  too  dense — some  manner  of 
dissipation  may  doubtless  be  good  for 
it.  We  are  bound  to  acknowledge, 
however,  that  a  considerable  process  of 
dissipation  is  now  going  on,  and  there 
fore  that  we  cannot  prudently  rely 
[  22  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

much  longer  on  the  old  formulas  and 
rituals.  Taking  things  at  their  very 
best,  we  cannot  much  longer  rest  as 
sured  that  those  who  penetrate  to  our 
secrets  must  do  so  by  an  arduously 
selective  process,  and  that  those  who 
linger  outside  will  justly  feel  the  coura 
geous  dignity  of  whoever  finally  wins 
his  right  to  place  therein.  We  have  not 
lost  our  basic  faith;  we  are  beginning 
to  perceive,  however,  that  if  our  faith  is 
to  be  sustained,  we  must  understand  it, 
and  exemplify  it,  and  assert  it  otherwise 
than  in  the  past. 

For  one  fact,  I  believe,  we  must  can 
didly  admit.  At  this  moment  more 
thought  is  given  to  education,  more 
effort  devoted  to  it,  more  expense  lav 
ished  on  it — of  time  and  of  energy  as 
well  as  of  unstinted  gift,  public  and 
private — than  ever  before.  Yet  there 
is  room  for  doubt  whether  the  practical 
[  23  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

result  of  it  has  ever  been  much  less 
palpable.  There  are  moods,  indeed, 
when  some  of  us  must  fall  to  wondering 
whether  educational  processes  were 
ever  before  so  indefinite  in  purpose,  or 
quite  so  ineffectual. 

This  brings  us  to  the  question  of 
what  we  mean  by  education.  Without 
attempting  precise  definition,  which 
might  involve  endless  dispute,  we  may, 
perhaps,  agree  on  two  or  three  com 
monplaces,  sufficient  for  our  purpose. 
Man,  to  begin  with,  whether  you  take 
the  word  to  mean  the  individual  or  the 
species,  has  the  misfortune  to  be  con 
scious.  Sooner  or  later  his  conscious 
ness  makes  him  aware  that,  at  least  as 
he  knows  himself  by  any  process  as  yet 
developed  or  devised,  he  is  a  thing 
surrounded  by  other  things,  or  by 
something  else.  A  convenient  name 
for  this  inconvenient  circumstance  is 
[  24  ]] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

environment.  Some  of  it,  like  his 
clothes,  his  friends  and  his  enemies,  is 
close  at  hand ;  some,  like  the  Antarctic 
Pole,  or  the  Moon,  or  the  planets,  or 
the  stars,  or  space  unfathomable  and 
time  without  end,  is  vanishingly  re 
mote.  There  it  is,  however,  every 
where  about  him,  perceived  and  un- 
perceived,  inextricably  intermingled, 
various,  indefinite,  infinite  if  you  will, 
yet,  so  far  as  it  surrounds  man,  a  unit, 
in  that  it  is  not  himself. 

Now  that  innocent  little  adverb  not 
implies  one  aspect  of  man's  environ 
ment,  from  his  point  of  view  important. 
Whatever  else  not  stirs  in  your  mind,  it 
cannot  help  reminding  you  of  the  un 
comfortable  fact  that  there  is  such  a 
thing  as  contradiction.  Environment, 
on  the  whole,  contradicts  man  with  a 
persistence  sure  at  last  to  be  fatal;  for 
he  generally  suffers  a  good  deal,  and  by 
[  25  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

and  by  he  dies.  Meanwhile,  as  we  have 
seen,  he  is  conscious;  and  his  con 
sciousness  manifests  itself  in  thought,  in 
speech,  in  work,  in  play,  in  behaviour. 
Thus  he  himself  is  part  of  the  environ 
ment  of  the  generations  which  have 
kindled  to  consciousness  and  faded 
into  ashes  before  him,  and  of  those 
destined  to  do  so  when  his  own  little 
flame  has  flickered  out.  He  is  a  torch- 
bearer,  if  you  like  the  pretty  old  meta 
phor,  carrying  the  gleam  of  life  through 
the  darkness  of  environment  which 
must  forever  enshroud  the  instant  con 
centrated  in  his  allotted  term  of  years. 
The  better  he  carries  his  torch,  the  less 
flickering  the  light  thereof,  the  happier 
he,  the  happier  those  to  come,  and  the 
more  content  we  may  fancy  the  van 
ished  fathers  who  have  confided  it  to 
his  passing  care.  Metaphor  is  perhaps 
leading  us  astray.  Without  its  aid, 
[  26  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

the  while,  we  might  hardly  have  under 
stood  so  well  as  now  what  we  mean  by 
believing  that  man  is  at  his  best  when 
best  adjusted  to  his  environment;  and 
that  the  best  means  we  know  of  helping 
him  toward  adjustment  is  our  reverend 
mystery  of  education. 

All  of  which,  together  with  its  vague 
ness,  has  a  comfortable  sound  of  pre 
cision.  If  we  are  at  all  right,  the  problem 
of  education  begins  to  look  refreshingly 
simple.  Ascertain  what  environment 
is,  and  what  man  is.  State  the  conse 
quent  formula  of  adjustment  in  approxi 
mate  terms ; — we  all  admit  that  ultimate 
exactitude  is  beyond  human  power,  but 
that  we  can  practically  get  along  with 
out  it.  And  there  we  are.  We  can  hand 
over  the  formula  to  those  who,  even  if 
slow  to  discover  it,  can  probably  use  it  as 
well  as  we.  Thereupon  we  may  devote 
our  own  energies  to  higher  things. 
[  27  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

When  we  begin  to  scrutinise  environ 
ment,  however,  it  turns  out  to  be  dis 
concertingly  elusive.  Take  it  scien 
tifically,  if  you  will:  astronomy  reveals 
to  us  a  universe  where  everything  is 
on  the  way  from  somewhere  to  some 
where  else;  so  does  geology;  so  does 
biology;  so  do  history,  and  economics, 
and  sociology,  and  physics,  and  chem 
istry.  The  fact  is  certain;  the  process 
is  observable  everywhere,  in  various 
phases,  some  of  them  unpleasantly  ex 
plosive.  These  occasional  explosions, 
particularly  when  they  take  place  in 
the  immediate  neighbourhood  of  man, 
excite  alert  desire  to  know  what  they 
mean.  In  certain  details,  such  as  the 
arrangement  of  electric  wires  in  the 
turrets  of  war  ships,  we  can  find  out, 
and  do  something  to  mend  matters; 
but  generally  we  can  only  recognise 
things  which  blow  us  up  as  manifes- 
[  28  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

tations  of  a  fact  which,  for  want  of  a 
better  term,  we  are  apt  nowadays  to 
describe  as  force.  Nobody  knows  what 
it  is ;  nobody  knows  why  it  exists ;  no 
body  knows  whence  it  comes,  or  whither 
it  goes;  yet  nobody  can  help  admitting, 
the  while,  that  every  atom  of  human 
environment  embodies  it,  more  or  less 
active  or  latent.  In  a  single  word,  we 
can  find  no  better  definition  of  environ 
ment  than  by  declaring  it  to  be  force. 
Which  may  not  seem  to  help  us  much 
until  we  remind  ourselves  that  thereby 
we  assert  it  to  be  something  never  fixed, 
never  at  rest,  always  instinct  with  the 
protean  movement  of  life. 

Of  all  the  manifestations  of  force 
which  consciously  affect  man,  none  are 
more  instantly  palpable  than  such  as 
involve  his  control  over  the  animate, 
and  still  more  the  inanimate,  condi 
tions  of  nature.  When  he  learned  to 
[  29  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

tame  domestic  animals,  for  example, 
his  relation  to  environment  manifestly 
changed ;  so,  still  more,  it  was  changed 
by  his  discovery  that  he  could  subject 
to  his  use  what  he  so  long  deluded 
himself  by  supposing  to  be  the  element 
of  fire.  The  very  terms  by  which  we 
still  describe  remote  ages  of  social  de 
velopment — the  Age  of  Stone,  the  Age 
of  Bronze,  and  so  on — remind  us  of  the 
old  changes  of  environing  force  which 
demanded  new  adjustments  to  meet 
their  unprecedented  conditions. 

By  the  time  when  man  began  to  re 
cord  himself,  he  was  approaching  what 
we  call  civilization,  of  which,  in  ulti 
mate  simplicity,  the  chief  conditions 
seem  to  have  been  mastery  of  fire,  of 
metal,  of  wheels,  and  of  sails.  The 
Egyptians  had  these,  and  the  Homeric 
heroes;  the  Romans  had  little  else;  and 
until  the  Nineteenth  Century  there  was 
[  30  ] 


O»    TH» 

UNIVERSITY 


i 

THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

not  much  else  anywhere,  except  gun 
powder  and  printing  presses.  Even 
under  these  fairly  simple  conditions, 
adjustment  to  environment  was  no 
child's  play.  Study  thereof,  and  of  its 
various  misadventures,  remains  the 
chief  occupation  of  traditional  scholar 
ship  everywhere.  In  consequence,  I 
remember  few  more  pregnant  hours 
than  I  passed,  some  dozen  years  ago, 
at  the  feet  of  a  Harvard  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  orator  who  pointed  out  that  the 
Nineteenth  Century— with  its  final  mas 
tery  of  steam  and  electricity — was  really 
the  beginning  of  a  new  ethnological 
epoch,  as  different  from  any  of  the 
earlier  periods  as  that  of  metals  was 
from  that  of  chipped  flints.  The  fact 
seems  to  me  undeniable.  Environment 
is  now  pressing  on  us  under  new  condi 
tions  and  at  an  unprecedented  rate. 
It  would  have  been  comfortable  to  fol- 
[  31  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

low  the  Harvard  orator  not  only  in  his 
assertions  but  in  his  conclusions.  Some 
of  his  hearers,  however,  seemed  indis 
posed  to  agree  without  reserve  that 
everything  would  always  be  all  right  if 
everybody  should  devote  all  his  energy 
to  the  science  or  the  art  of  engineering. 
Environment  nowadays — and,  so  far 
as  any  one  now  on  earth  is  concerned, 
henceforth — proves  to  be  not  only  force, 
but  force  in  all  the  complexity  of  un 
precedented  epochal  conditions,  which 
nobody  can  pretend  to  understand. 
The  only  certain  fact  about  it,  at  least 
to  my  thinking,  is  that  on  which  I 
touched  a  moment  ago.  Throughout 
our  lifetimes  the  rate  at  which  it  has 
moved  has  been  swiftly  accelerating. 
Think  of  anything  you  like  as  it  was 
in  the  year  1900;  or,  better  still,  turn 
to  what  you  wrote  about  any  condi 
tions  surrounding  you  ten  years  ago. 
[  32  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

You  may  count  yourself  a  prophet  if 
you  find  your  experience  much  other 
than  that  of  a  friend  of  mine  who 
lately  read  over  some  observations  on 
contemporary  England  set  down,  to 
the  best  of  his  ability,  in  the  last  year 
of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  He  found 
hardly  a  word  to  alter,  he  said;  only, 
with  old-age  pensions  grinning  in  his 
face,  and  Mr.  Lloyd-George's  Budget 
voted  to  meet  them,  the  essay  im 
pressed  him  as  a  document  from  times 
as  remote  as  those  of  the  Tudors  or 
the  Plantagenets.  Ten  years  hence,  one 
may  venture  to  guess,  the  conditions 
of  to-day  may  well  seem  prehistoric. 
It  is  to  nothing  less  than  this  environ 
ment  of  indefinitely  accelerating  force 
that  modern  education  attempts  to  ad 
just  man. 

This  first  term  of  our  problem  thus 
proves  rather  less  manageable  than  it 
[    33   ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

sounded.  Contenting  ourselves,  how 
ever,  with  humble  recognition  that 
environment  is  accelerating  force,  we 
may  now  go  on  to  consider  what  man 
is,  whom  we  have  got  somehow  to  try 
to  adjust  to  it.  He  is  conscious,  beyond 
question;  and  he  has  paid  himself  the 
compliment  of  describing  his  con 
sciousness  by  the  somewhat  hyperbolic 
name  of  intelligence.  We  may  grant, 
indeed,  that  whether  he  can  really 
understand  anything  or  not,  he  will 
always  suppose  that  he  can.  Intelli 
gent,  therefore,  we  will  call  him  for  our 
momentary  purpose  of  definition.  Even 
more  clearly,  he  is  at  once  the  product 
of  certain  natural  forces — such  as  an 
cestors  and  history — and  himself  a 
source  of  similar  natural  forces,  more 
or  less  destined  to  affect  other  people. 
He  can  beget  children,  preach  sermons, 
make  works  of  art,  or  trouble,  or 
[  34  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

mistakes.  In  other  words,  he  can 
somehow  accumulate  force  from  his 
environment,  and  somehow  radiate  it 
thereto.  For  our  purposes,  I  believe, 
we  may  best  accordingly  consider  him 
as  an  intelligent  focus  of  force. 

That  metaphorical  definition  has  the 
baffling  fault  of  immateriality ;  unless  I 
am  quite  mistaken,  a  focus  is  only  a 
point,  with  neither  length,  breadth,  nor 
thickness  to  disturb  its  ethereal  purity. 
To  think  any  further,  we  need  some 
thing  a  little  more  substantial.  We  may 
liken  man,  therefore,  not  to  a  focus  pure 
and  simple,  but  to  the  focal  instrument 
most  familiar  to  our  everyday  habits  of 
mind — namely,  a  lens,  such  as  gathers, 
and  concentrates  or  disperses,  rays  of 
light.  His  relation  to  the  force  which 
he  collects  and  radiates  is  something 
like  that  of  an  object-glass  or  of  a 
burning-glass  to  the  phase  of  force 
[  35  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

which  we  now  figure  to  ourselves  in 
the  guise  of  light-waves  or  heat-waves. 
The  most  important  error  in  our  simile 
is  that  man,  as  we  conceive  him,  differs 
from  a  piece  of  glass  or  crystal  in  the 
matter  of  intelligence.  However  erro 
neous  our  notion  may  be  proved  by  the 
sympathetically  accelerated  intelligence 
of  times  to  come,  we  cannot  yet  habit 
ually  imagine  the  lens  of  commerce  as 
flexibly  and  consciously  sensitive,  or  as 
ever  troubled  with  desire  to  know  what 
it  is  about.  Man,  considered  as  a  focal 
lens  of  force,  on  the  other  hand,  is  so 
troubled  all  the  time,  inevitably  and 
rightly.  Rightly,  I  say,  because  we 
shall  hardly  disagree  that  if  his  intelli 
gence  languish,  he  will  neither  gather 
nor  radiate  force  with  any  but  accidental 
effect,  and  yet  that  if  his  intelligence 
grow  excessive  it  will  somehow  cloud  or 
paralyze  his  focal  powers.  He  has 
[  36  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

never  yet  been  at  his  ideal  best ;  doubt 
less — to  use  a  favourite  phrase  of  old 
Increase  Mather — he  never  will  be  until 
the  second  coming  of  Our  Lord.  He  is 
nearest  his  ideal  best  when  his  intelli 
gence  and  his  focal  powers,  cumulative 
and  radiatory  alike,  are  most  nearly 
balanced. 

To  illustrate  what  I  have  in  mind, 
we  may  perhaps  turn  to  a  few  examples 
of  it.  Somewhere  in  the  work  of  John 
Stuart  Mill,  if  I  remember  rightly,  he 
points  out  the  indisputable  truth  that, 
so  far  as  man  is  concerned  with  material 
things,  human  activity  may  be  reduced 
to  the  power  of  taking  something  from 
somewhere  and  putting  it  somewhere 
else.  If,  with  this  principle  in  mind,  we 
turn  our  attention  to  a  fine  art,  such 
as  cookery  or  architecture,  we  shall 
soon  come  to  agree  that  the  best  artists 
— the  best  cooks  or  the  best  architects 
[  37  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

— are  those  who  best  know  what  to 
take  and  where  to  put  it,  and  who  are 
not  troubled  by  hesitant  indecision  in 
the  process.  Eggs  or  spices,  stone 
or  wood  or  metal,  lie  ready  at  hand ;  so 
do  fire  and  machines,  ovens  and  en 
gines  and  derricks.  ./Eons  of  experi 
ment  have  proved  what  can  be  done 
with  them.  Here  are  a  few  of  the 
countless  rays  of  force  ready  for  con 
centration  in  the  little  human  focus 
prepared  to  gather  them.  Let  him 
use  intelligence  enough  to  gather  them 
selectively,  and  half  his  work  is  done; 
if,  meanwhile,  his  intelligence  has 
served  him  to  gather  among  them  rays 
which  the  next  man  would  have  neg 
lected,  his  half-done  work  is  done  in 
the  manner  sometimes  called  original 
and  sometimes  great. 

If  he  is  really  to  achieve  anything,  the 
while,  let  alone  originality  or  greatness, 
[   38   ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

the  other  half  of  his  focal  task  must  be 
performed  as  well;  he  must  put  these 
ingredients  or  materials,  which  he  has 
taken  from  somewhere,  in  the  precise 
somewhere  else  where  his  intelligence 
leads  him  to  suppose  that  they  most 
happily  belong.  He  must  concentrate 
or  radiate  them  into  his  own  sauce, 
or  his  own  cathedral.  If  he  do  this 
right,  he  has  made  them  a  new  centre 
of  force — bodily  or  spiritual,  or  both. 
Others  than  he  will  eat  and  give  thanks, 
or  kneel  in  adoration,  and  otherwise  dc 
their  own  focal  work  the  better  for  his. 
If  he  do  his  work  amiss,  however,  the 
sauce  will  be  unsavory,  the  cathedral 
unstable  or  ugly,  both  useless,  or  at 
best  short  of  the  usefulness  which 
might  have  been  theirs.  In  such  re 
grettable  event,  when  you  come  to  con 
sider  why  things  have  gone  wrong,  you 
will  generally  find  that  it  is  either  be- 
[  39  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

cause  he  has  gathered  his  material  stu 
pidly,  or  has  used  it  stupidly,  or  has 
stopped  to  think  how  not  to  be  stupid 
until  he  has  unwittingly  become  more 
impotent  than  if  he  had  not  stopped  to 
think  at  all.  In  other  words,  his  intelli 
gence  and  his  focal  powers  have  got  out 
of  balance. 

Or  take  a  more  subtle  instance,  or  at 
least  a  more  complicated.  Man,  we  all 
know,  is  a  political  animal;  and  now 
adays  he  is  hereabouts  rather  disquiet- 
ingly  active  in  this  aspect.  A  good  deal 
of  our  public  conduct  must  turn  on 
majority  votes,  cast  for  immensely  va 
rious  reasons,  of  self-interest,  of  patri 
otic  or  moral  principle,  of  prejudice  or 
invincible  ignorance,  or  carelessness  or 
of  what  presents  itself  to  the  voters  in 
the  light  of  intelligence.  As  American 
citizens,  men — alone  or  collected — are 
tremendously  focal  centres  of  force. 
[  40  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

On  what  they  think,  or  on  what  they 
think  that  they  think,  about  sundry 
matters  must  depend  what  they  do,  or 
at  least  what  they  try  to  do,  about  them. 
On  what  they  really  do,  purposely  or 
not,  must  considerably  depend  our  na 
tional  welfare. 

At  this  moment,  for  example,  certain 
general  questions  are  in  the  air.  With 
out  venturing  even  to  suggest  answers, 
I  shall  ask  you  to  agree  that  we  shall 
hardly  waste  the  little  time  demanded 
for  reminding  ourselves  of  the  kind  of 
political  force  at  present  environing  us. 
Every  one  admits  nowadays,  as  a  gen 
eral  principle,  that  special  privilege  is 
objectionable;  yet  protected  industries 
are  honestly  demanding  what  seems 
like  special  privilege  to  many  of  our 
citizens;  and,  with  equal  honesty, 
labour  unions  are  demanding  what 
seems  equally  like  it  to  some  others. 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

Again,  a  generally  admitted  principle 
asserts  that  direct  taxation  should  fall 
proportionately  on  everybody,  so  that 
everybody  may  be  aware  of  just  what 
degree  of  legal  imposition  he  is  called 
on  to  bear.  If  there  be  an  exception  to 
this  principle,  it  is  that  those  who  im 
pose  a  direct  tax  should  be  willing  to 
bear  at  least  their  full  share  of  it;  oth 
erwise  you  have  what  has  generally 
been  called  confiscation,  to  greater  or 
less  degree.  Yet  not  only  popular 
prejudice  but  the  utterances  of  emi 
nent  statesmen  and  of  far  from  radical 
newspapers  are  vigorously  informing 
us  that  a  graduated  tax  on  inheritances 
and  incomes — a  tax  which  completely 
spares  the  majority,  who  are  poor,  and 
despoils  the  minority,  who  are  rich — 
is  obviously  correct  in  principle. 

Still   again,    and    putting    aside   the 
predatory  forces  thus  called  to  mind, 
[  42  1 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

there  is  room  for  great  difference  of 
opinion  concerning  the  proper  function 
of  legislation.  To  some  it  appears  clear 
that  no  legislative  act  can  be  healthy, 
and  probably  that  none  can  really  be 
operative,  which  contradicts  custom; 
equally  respectable  thinkers  believe 
heart  and  soul  in  imposing  righteous 
ness  on  humanity  by  legislation.  It  is 
said  that  an  American  legislature  once 
placed  the  Ten  Commandments  on  a 
Statute  Book  by  a  considerable  major 
ity.  It  is  certain  that  prohibitory  legis 
lation,  theoretically  contrary  to  the 
rights  of  the  individual,  and  practically 
neglectful  of  the  regular  conduct  of 
civilized  mankind,  commands  wide  ap 
proval,  even  if  mitigated  by  narrow 
sympathy.  The  function  of  our  courts 
is  equally  unsettled  in  the  public  mind. 
Some  highly  desirable  citizens  hold 
that  the  business  of  judges  is  to  de- 
[  43  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

fine  and  to  maintain  the  law;  others, 
of  stainless  patriotism,  urge  that  if  the 
law  chance  to  be  unpopular,  or  other 
wise  unacceptable,  a  judge  who  should 
maintain  it  probably  deserves  impeach 
ment,  and  certainly  ought  to  be  defeat 
ed  in  case  he  hold  his  seat  by  popular 
vote  and  present  himself  for  re-election. 
How  these  questions,  and  the  number 
less  more  which  they  may  suggest, 
should  be  answered,  we  need  not 
dispute.  We  shall  agree,  I  hope,  that 
man  can  answer  them  best  when  he 
can  best  perceive  on  the  one  hand 
what  they  mean,  and  on  the  other 
what  consequences  his  answer  will  in 
volve.  In  other  words,  political  man,  like 
man  the  artist — cook  or  architect — is  at 
his  best  when  his  intelligence  and  his 
focal  powers  are  most  nearly  balanced. 
Now  such  balance  is  evidence  of  the 
nearest  possible  adjustment  of  man  to 
[  44  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

his  environment — of  our  focal  lens  of 
force  to  the  force  amid  which  it  lives  out 
its  little  span  of  life;  and  to  help  tow 
ard  some  such  adjustment  is  one  chief 
function,  as  we  have  already  seen,  of 
this  perplexing  mystery  of  ours — the 
mystery  of  education,  which  we  pro 
fess,  and  cherish,  and  revere.  So  far  as 
we  profess  it,  we  must  begin  to  feel,  our 
work  in  this  world  has  an  aspect  full  of 
stimulus  both  imaginative  and  moral, 
which  a  good  many  of  us — focally 
blind,  if  you  will — are  accustomed  now 
adays  to  neglect  or  to  ignore.  It  can 
not  help  affecting  man — artist,  political 
animal,  and  countless  things  else.  It 
cannot  help  either  stimulating  or  im 
pairing  his  power  of  adjustment  to  his 
environment.  We  sometimes  speak  of 
the  humanities  as  if  they  were  a  sepa 
rate  and  almost  negligible  part  of  such 
work  as  is  ours  in  this  world.  Techni- 
[  45  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

cally,  I  will  cheerfully  grant  you,  they 
are;  but  only  because  we  have  con 
fined  the  name  to  limits  far  more  nar 
row  than  its  meaning.  Plays  with 
words  may  obscure  truth  or  conceal  it; 
they  can  never  avert  it.  Whether  we 
will  or  not,  the  true  office  of  education, 
from  beginning  to  end,  is  irresistibly, 
tremendously,  magnificently  human. 

When  I  touched  on  this  point  a  little 
while  ago,  you  may  remember,  I  men 
tioned  an  opinion  here  and  there  held 
by  serious  observers  to  the  effect  that 
educational  processes  are,  neverthe 
less,  at  this  moment  remarkably  in 
definite  in  purpose  and  ineffectual  in 
result.  If  there  be  reason  for  this — 
and  I  fear  that  few  of  us  can  feel  com 
placently  certain  of  the  contrary — it 
should  seem  sadly  to  follow  that  we  who 
are  engaged  in  the  conduct  of  education 
nowadays  leave  something  to  be  de- 
[  46  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

sired  in  point  of  professional  efficiency. 
Take,  for  example,  the  condition  in 
which  we  find  the  study  of  languages, 
ancient  and  modern — Greek  or  Latin, 
French  or  German  or  English.  A  stu 
dent  who  can  currently  read  a  foreign 
language,  after  a  good  many  years  of 
nominal  devotion  to  it  at  school  and  at 
college,  is  as  remarkable  as  a  black  swan 
or  a  white  crow ;  a  student  who  emerges 
from  a  course  of  earnest  instruction  in 
English  composition  with  perceptibly, 
or  at  least  with  incontestably,  firmer 
command  of  his  pen  for  general  pur 
poses  than  he  had  to  begin  with,  has 
hardly  yet  had  the  benevolence  to  cross 
my  path.  Something  analogous  is  true 
of  work  in  literature,  in  history,  in 
philosophy;  it  seems  more  or  less  true 
wherever  my  observation  has  extended. 
The  most  comforting  comment  on  it 
takes  the  form  of  assurance  that,  inas- 
[  47  1 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

much  as  ideals  would  no  longer  be 
ideals  if  they  were  attainable,  an  ideal 
ist  so  fatuous  as  to  look  for  anything 
like  ideal  results  is  doomed  to  disap 
pointment. 

Refreshed  by  this,  one  is  presently 
confronted  with  another  fact,  less  de 
batable.  It  is  from  these  very  students 
that  our  own  colleges,  other  colleges, 
schools  everywhere,  the  country  in  gen 
eral  yearly  select  the  teachers  charged 
with  the  task  of  instructing  younger 
human  beings  in  subjects  so  far  from 
mastered  by  themselves.  If  the  conse 
quent  predicament  were  local,  all  we 
should  need  anywhere  would  be  to 
ascertain  where  what  we  try  to  do  is 
done  better  than  we  do  it,  and  to  cor 
rect  our  errors  accordingly.  So  far  as 
I  am  aware,  however,  search  for  such 
light  has  hardly  led  us  beyond  regions 
of  darkness  indistinguishable  from  our 
[  48  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

own;  this  seems  as  extensive  as  the 
North  American  Continent,  if  not,  in 
deed,  as  the  modern  world.  One  sadly 
recalls  the  story  of  the  student  who 
made  pilgrimage  to  a  celebrated  insti 
tution  of  learning,  for  the  purpose  of 
sitting  at  somebody's  feet,  and  com 
plained  that,  alas,  he  could  find  no  feet 
to  sit  at.  Humble  in  spirit  though  we 
may  be,  it  is  not  granted  us  to  perceive 
others  demonstrably  much  better  than 
ourselves.  So  there  we  are.  We  all  do 
our  best;  we  all  know  that  those  who 
study  under  us  may  be  trusted  to  do 
theirs,  at  least  when  charged  with  re 
sponsibility.  The  trouble  is  not  moral. 
Yet  we  ourselves,  on  the  whole,  teach 
ill;  and  those  whom  we  teach,  ill- 
taught,  teach  in  turn  rather  more  ill 
still ;  and  those  whom  they  have  taught 
surge  up  to  us  year  by  year,  to  be 
taught  on,  less  and  less  ready  to  under- 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

stand  what  little  teaching  we  have 
begun  to  learn  how  to  give  them. 

There  is  trouble  here,  at  first  baf 
fling.  As  f ocusses  of  force,  we  all  begin 
to  seem  despairingly  out  of  adjustment. 
Unless  our  line  of  reasoning  has  been 
all  wrong,  however,  we  may  presently 
conclude  that  when  any  of  us  is  out  of 
adjustment  it  must  be  for  one  of  three 
reasons:  either  intelligence,  or  cumu 
lative  power,  or  radiatory  power  is  dis 
proportionate — excessive  or  defective, 
as  the  case  may  be.  The  immediately 
consequent  consideration  to  which  I 
shall  invite  your  attention  may,  perhaps, 
have  its  allurements ;  for  it  is  evidently 
an  intelligent  though  cursory  scrutiny 
of  a  matter  dear  to  us  all — namely,  the 
condition  of  our  own  intelligence,  so 
far  as  we  are  teachers  or  scholars. 

One  thing  seems  instantly  clear. 
At  this  moment  our  intelligence  is 
F  50  1 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

alive  and  wide-awake.  Yet  a  very 
little  retrospect  will  probably  convince 
us  that  it  has  waked  up  pretty  lately. 
In  old  times,  as  the  times  of  our  youth 
have  acceleratingly  become,  the  pur 
pose  of  teaching  was  chiefly  discipli 
nary,  and  the  method  authoritative.  I 
remember,  for  example,  the  anecdote  of 
a  schoolmaster  in  an  old  New  England 
seaport,  who  was  trying  to  teach  a  stub 
born  boy  the  elements  of  navigation. 
He  made  some  statement  about  loga 
rithms,  and  the  boy  inquired  how  he 
knew  it  was  so.  The  teacher  pulled  a 
knife  out  of  his  pocket:  "  What's  that  ?" 
he  asked. — "A  pen-knife,"  said  the 
boy. — "How  do  you  know?"  asked  the 
teacher. — "I  don't  know  how  I  know," 
answered  the  boy,  "but  I  know  I 
know." — "Very  well,"  said  the  teacher, 
"that  is  the  way  I  know  logarithms"; 
and  thereupon  he  proceeded  with  the 
[  51  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

lesson — this  part  of  which  the  boy 
never  forgot.  The  principles  and  meth 
ods  thus  exemplified  had  one  great 
merit:  they  remarkably  developed  and 
strengthened  in  pupils  the  power  of 
concentrating  attention,  by  sheer  force 
of  will,  on  uninteresting  matters.  Apart 
from  this,  they  had  no  obvious  effect 
on  what  intelligence  the  pupils  may 
have  possessed.  We  have  bravely 
changed  all  that.  One  reason  why  our 
intelligence  is  so  wide-awake  nowadays 
may  perhaps  be  found  in  the  fact  that 
the  intelligence  of  our  predecessors  was 
almost  asleep.  So  long  as  force  is  force 
and  life  is  life,  the  story  of  both  will  be 
one  of  action  and  reaction. 

Now  our  scientific  friends,  I  believe, 
tell  us  that  reaction  and  action  are 
ultimately  equal.  Those  of  us  who 
are  not  initiated  into  the  mysteries  of 
science  are  accordingly  driven  toward 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

the  conclusion  that  if  the  one  gets  us 
nowhere,  the  other  will  get  us  nowhere 
else.  Matters  might  be  worse.  The 
old  teaching  had  its  merits,  after  all; 
though  it  was  not  very  intelligent,  and 
though  its  focal  selection  of  force  was 
extremely  limited,  it  managed  to  radi 
ate  with  considerable  exactitude  and 
with  some  approach  to  intensity.  It 
did  not  know  what  it  was  about;  but 
it  came  fairly  near  accomplishing  its 
blind  and  traditional  purpose.  The 
chief  trouble  lay  in  the  fact  that  blind 
tradition  can  hardly  lead  to  such  va 
riation  as  is  nowadays  adored  under 
the  name  of  progress.  When  intelli 
gence  began  to  wake  up,  the  air  seemed 
thrilling  with  promise.  We  would  ask 
ourselves  what  we  were  about ;  we 
would  get  rid  of  outworn  obstacles ;  we 
would  direct  all  our  energies  straight  to 
the  point,  as  soon  as  the  point  was 
[  53  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

found;  and  such  beings  as  should  re 
sult  from  these  millennial  new  adjust 
ments  would  evince  the  infinite  perfec 
tibility  of  human  nature.  So  we  went 
to  work,  and  so  we  are  at  work  still. 
We  know  what  we  are  about  far  more 
nearly  than  people  knew  a  century  ago. 
We  have  got  rid  of  many  obstacles 
without  always  making  sure  that  they 
were  needless;  we  have  attempted,  for 
example,  to  cure  the  reluctance  of  pu 
pils  by  allowing  them — from  kinder 
garten  to  elective  courses  at  college — 
the  luxury  of  the  slightest  possible 
strain  on  unwilling  attention.  Yet  we 
have  not  incontestably  improved  the 
pupils,  nor  yet  so  certainly  ascertained 
just  where  to  direct  our  energies  as  to 
direct  them  anywhere  with  quite  the  in 
tensity  of  our  rule-of-thumb  predeces 
sors.  Earth,  in  fact,  is  no  nearer 
heaven  than  it  used  to  be.  At  times, 
[  54  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

indeed,  some  of  us,  still  resolved  to 
get  there  or  to  know  the  reason  why, 
grow  sensible  of  doubt  whether  the 
time  is  not  at  hand  when  we  may 
best  sit  down,  with  good  cigars,  and 
think  out  the  reason  why. 

Thus  ruminating,  we  should  prob 
ably  come  to  the  conclusion  that  one 
reason  why  is  that  we  have  been  trying 
too  hard  to  understand  what  we  are 
about.  We  all  know  the  sermons 
which  have  been  preached  from  the 
text  of  Hamlet.  We  all  know,  as  well, 
that  academies  have  never  yet  pro 
duced  great  works  of  art;  and  some  of 
our  friends  assure  us  that  what  we 
cherish  as  our  intelligence  shrinks  to 
nothing  beside  that  of  certain  Oriental 
sages  devoted  to  life-long  contempla 
tion  of  their  own  navels.  One  might 
go  on,  world  without  end.  The  sum 
and  substance  of  it  all  would  be  that 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

some  inkling  of  why  the  teachers  of 
to-day  are  inefficient,  or,  in  other  words, 
ill-adjusted  to  their  environment,  may 
perhaps  be  found  in  a  reactionary 
awakening  of  intelligence  to  a  degree 
where  it  begins  to  be  inhibitory. 

Now  our  previous  considerations 
should  assure  us  at  this  point  of  some 
thing  comfortably  near  a  fact.  So  far  as 
intelligence  can  be  inhibitory  in  its  effect 
on  man,  as  a  focus  of  force — and  there 
fore  so  far  as  it  can  interfere  with  him  as 
an  agent  or  a  subject  of  education — it 
must  do  so  by  interfering  either  with  his 
focal  power  of  gathering  force  or  with 
his  equally  focal  power  of  radiating  it. 

Our  question  thus  becomes  more 
definite;  and  the  moment  we  inquire, 
in  the  first  place,  if,  how,  and  when  in 
telligence  has  come  to  meddle  with  the 
cumulative  powers  of  our  little  human 
lenses,  we  can  begin  to  discern  an 
[  56  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

obvious  answer.  In  the  good  old 
times,  we  have  agreed,  intelligence  was 
torpid.  Awakened,  and  directed  tow 
ard  the  state  of  education  at  the  period 
of  its  awakening,  its  honest  conviction, 
quite  warranted  by  the  momentary 
facts,  was  that  education  had  become 
stupidly  conventional.  People  learned 
things  by  heart,  all  the  way  from  the 
alphabet  to  geometry  and  the  Odes  of 
Horace;  what  they  had  thus  learned 
they  repeated  to  others  who  tried  to 
learn  from  them;  they  were  getting  to 
resemble  Mohammedan  scholars,  re 
quired  to  commit  to  memory  the  Koran 
and  all  the  orthodox  glosses  on  the 
sacred  text,  and  supposed  to  need  no 
more  knowledge  this  side  of  Paradise. 
The  consequent  counsel  of  intelligence 
was  that  you  should  try  to  understand 
what  you  know  before  you  proceed  to 
do  anything  else  with  it. 
[  57  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

This  reaction  we  may  agree  to  have 
been  healthy,  like  the  awakening  of 
intelligence  which  stimulated  it.  Very 
clearly,  there  was  chance  for  improve 
ment.  We  must  set  ourselves  to  work 
selectively.  We  must  not  rest  content 
with  accepting  and  imparting  knowl 
edge;  we  must  scrutinise  it,  and  ac 
quire  it.  We  must  test  what  comes  to 
us,  proving  all  things,  and  holding  fast 
only  to  that  which  is  good.  Torpidity 
had  lulled  our  cumulative  powers  till 
they  were  starving  for  want  of  use. 
Here  was  the  place  where  healthy  reac 
tion  would  surely  bring  about  a  new 
adjustment,  better  for  the  whole  uni 
verse. 

That  the  reaction  has  done  a  great 
deal  of  good  I  should  be  the  last  to 
deny.  We  can  hardly  imagine  nowa 
days  what  vast  fields  of  inquiry,  fa 
miliar  and  remote,  still  lay  fallow  a 
[  58  ] 


THE   MYSTERY   OF  EDUCATION 

generation  or  two  ago.  A  generation 
or  two  ago  hardly  any  one  could  have 
imagined  how  few  to-day  would  re 
main  unbroken  by  plough  or  even 
harrow.  The  harvests  garnered  in 
libraries  all  over  the  world  are  rich 
beyond  the  dreams  of  scholars  whom 
you  and  I  can  remember;  and  these 
treasures,  in  their  crude  form  gener 
ally  to  be  described  as  theses,  are  true 
treasures,  in  that  they  imply  something 
more  than  hard  and  conscientious 
work;  they  could  never  have  been 
wrested  from  their  hidden  lairs  without 
the  inspiration  of  devoted  enthusiasm. 
It  has  all  been  worth  while.  So  we 
press  on  still,  competitively  eager  to 
gather  and  to  garner  more  and  more. 
But  some  of  us,  the  Lord  knows  why, 
are  beginning  to  wonder  whether,  on 
the  whole,  we  have  not  gone  rather  too 
far.  No  one  could  pretend  that  intelli- 
[  59  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

gence  has  here  proved  inhibitory  to 
education  by  any  process  of  repression. 
If  it  be  true,  however,  that  intelligence 
is  inhibitory  at  all,  here  is  a  point 
where  the  trouble  may  perhaps  partly 
lie,  by  reason  of  an  over-development 
as  fatal  to  balance  as  atrophy  itself. 

We  have  strayed  long  enough  in  the 
misty  regions  of  metaphor.  It  is  time 
to  consider  just  what  we  mean.  Noth 
ing  can  remind  us  more  distinctly  than 
the  subjects  of  theses  to  which  candi 
dates  for  the  degree  of  doctor  of  philos 
ophy,  or  the  like,  have  consecrated 
months  and  years  of  earnest  work. 
Here  are  two  or  three.  I  remember  at 
Harvard,  not  many  years  ago,  one  in 
Latin,  certified  as  creditable  by  such 
of  my  colleagues  as  can  currently  read 
that  learned  language,  on  the  methods 
of  hair-dressing  practised  in  imperial 
Rome.  I  have  been  informed,  by  the 
[  60  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

way,  if  I  remember  rightly,  that  the 
scholar  who  wrote  it  was  not  excep 
tional  for  personal  tidiness.  I  remem 
ber  another  entitled  "  De  ea  quae 
dicitur  attractione  in  enuntiationibus  rel- 
ativis  apud  scriptores  Grcecos" — which 
means,  I  believe,  "Concerning  what  is 
called  attraction  in  relative  constructions 
used  by  Greek  authors."  A  third  con 
cerned  the  tenure  of  land  in  the  domin 
ions  of  Brandenburg  under  the  sover 
eignty  of  the  Great  Elector;  the  writer 
of  this  is  said  by  one  of  his  examiners 
to  have  displayed  boundless  ignorance 
of  shipping  laws  and  tariffs  in  English- 
speaking  regions ;  but  he  was  so  unique 
an  authority  on  Brandenburg  real 
estate  that  he  was  declared  proficient 
in  economic  history. 

Any    one     familiar     with     modern 
American  universities  must  have  plenty 
of  similar  memories.    Pretty  lately,  for 
[    01    ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

example,  my  attention  as  a  student 
of  literature  in  America  has  been 
called  to  a  printed  thesis  which  pro 
fessed  to  make  some  contribution  to 
the  literary  history  of  Colonial  Penn 
sylvania,  and  to  another  about  the 
"Heralds  of  American  Literature." 
The  latter  dealt  with  works  written  in 
America  between  the  Revolution  and 
the  year  1800.  This  stagnant  period 
had  already  been  exhaustively  treat 
ed  by  the  late  Professor  Tyler;  he  had 
omitted,  however,  to  emphasize  the 
important  truth  that  certain  letters  of 
Joel  Barlow,  or  some  such  forgotten 
worthy,  are  preserved  in  the  Public 
Library  of  Southport,  Connecticut. 

To  turn  to  foreign  fields,  there  is  no 
degree  anywhere  more  worthily  sus 
tained  than  that  of  Doctor  of  Letters, 
at  the  University  of  Paris.  Among  the 
theses  presented  there  by  candidates  in 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

Modern  Literature  a  generation  ago 
was  the  admirable  work  of  the  late 
Professor  Beljame  on  "The  Public  and 
Men  of  Letters  in  England  during  the 
Eighteenth  Century."  Whoever  has 
had  the  pleasure  of  reading  it  must 
have  recognised  its  permanent  value  in 
defining  how  English  literature  passed 
from  the  stage  of  dependence  on  pa 
tronage  to  that  of  self-support,  derived 
from  willing  readers  who  stood  ready 
to  purchase.  The  book  throws  new 
floods  of  light  into  the  toiling  garrets  of 
Grub  Street.  The  very  fact,  however, 
that  a  brilliant  French  student  should 
have  turned  his  attention  to  so  limited 
a  field  of  English  literature  implies 
that  the  field  of  French  literature  was 
approaching  exhaustion.  The  sub 
jects  of  some  later  theses  produced  in 
France  imply  the  same  fact  there  con 
cerning  the  literary  history  of  England. 
[  63  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

Here  are  a  few  of  them:  "The  Youth 
of  Wordsworth,"  "Robert  Burns," 
"George  Crabbe,"  "John  Thelwall," 
"Edgar  Allan  Poe,"  "Nathaniel  Haw 
thorne,"  "Ralph  Waldo  Emerson," 
"Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,"  and  "Will 
iam  James."  I  have  reason  to  believe, 
indeed,  that  a  serious  French  candidate 
has  lately  considered  a  project  of  pre 
senting  for  the  Doctorate  of  Letters  at 
the  Sorbonne  a  punctilious  study  of  the 
work  of  Mr.  William  Dean  Ho  wells. 

By  this  time  the  conclusion  toward 
which  our  course  of  specification  has 
tended  must  loom  clear.  The  healthy 
reactionary  impulse  of  intelligence  tow 
ard  investigation  has  got  to  a  point 
where  a  rapidly  increasing  amount  of 
investigating  energy  must  be  devoted 
to  inquiring  what  there  is  left  to  inves 
tigate.  One  can  imagine,  indeed,  an 
approaching  future  when  the  mere  dis- 
[  64  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

covery  of  some  uninvestigated  corner  of 
any  field  of  study  imaginable  shall  be 
hailed  with  tumultuous  learned  ova 
tion  all  over  the  world  as  abundant  and 
overflowing  evidence  of  such  power  as 
should  command  the  highest  possible 
degree,  from  the  most  rigorous  of  aca 
demic  tribunals.  When  this  rapturous 
vision  begins  to  fade  into  the  light  of 
common  day,  any  of  us  who  may  have 
yielded  ourselves  to  its  allurements 
must  awaken  to  its  chief  meaning  for 
us  here  and  now.  If  we  momentarily 
agree  to  consider  your  teacher  or  your 
scholar  as  if  he  were  a  man,  and 
therefore  an  intelligent  focus  of  force, 
and  if  we  admit  that  he  is  at  present 
inefficient  for  want  of  adjustment  to 
his  environment,  we  can  hardly  avoid 
perceiving  that  one  reason  why  may  be 
found  in  an  inhibitory  excess  of  intel 
ligence  which  has  resulted  in  over-stim- 
[  65  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

ulated  exhaustion  of  his  focal  power  of 
accumulation. 

To  put  the  case  more  simply,  we  are 
all  at  our  best — men  or  teachers  or 
scholars — when  we  know,  with  the 
least  hesitation,  what  we  possess,  and 
what  we  want,  and  what  to  do  with 
both.  If  we  devote  ourselves  too  stren 
uously  to  hunting  for  what  we  want, 
we  run  the  risk  of  forgetting  what  we 
have,  of  not  knowing  why  we  want 
what  we  want,  and  of  losing  all  con 
ception  of  what  on  earth  we  shall  do 
with  anything,  whether  already  in  our 
possession  or  by  and  by  to  be  got  there 
from  somewhere  else.  That  string  of 
words  has  a  thread  of  meaning,  to  hold 
it  together;  and  nothing  short  of  what 
sounds  preposterous  could  have  brought 
us  without  shock  to  a  recent  incident  in 
my  professional  life.  Preposterous  or 
not,  it  will  serve  our  next  and  almost 
[  66  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

our  last  purpose;  this  is  evidently  to 
consider  what  sort  of  radiance  we 
teachers  nowadays  diffuse  among  the 
students  at  our  feet. 

In  one  of  my  classes  there  was  a 
youth  of  deserving  aspect,  who  did 
me  the  honour  to  follow  my  lectures 
attentively.  So  I  felt  duly  grateful; 
and  when  he  asked  whether  he  might 
consult  me  about  his  plans  in  life,  I 
was  more  than  glad  to  put  my  wis 
dom  at  his  service.  Within  a  few 
weeks,  it  presently  transpired,  he  had 
come  for  the  first  time  into  posses 
sion  of  an  encyclopaedia.  The  joys  of 
ownership  had  impelled  him  to  plunge 
deep  into  the  volumes.  He  had  there 
upon  perceived,  with  genial  precision, 
one  thing  which  was  the  matter  with 
learning,  as  previously  imparted  to 
him.  It  had  been  presented  only  in 
fragments ;  as  he  put  the  case,  every- 
[  67  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

thing  had  been  awfully  specialised. 
That  his  encyclopaedia  was  composed 
by  specialists  he  cheerfully  conceded; 
that  its  contents  were  even  more  frag 
mentary  than  his  college  courses  he  was 
equally  ready  to  admit.  He  urged, 
however,  that  there  was  a  good  deal 
more  in  the  encyclopaedia  than  the 
best  specialist  of  them  all  could  ever 
pretend  to  know.  This  granted,  he 
went  on,  with  divinely  synthetic  im 
pulse,  to  opine  that,  if  you  could  put 
this  material  completely  together,  you 
would  know  everything.  Within  the 
present  limits  of  human  knowledge, 
I  agreed,  some  such  statement  of  ideal 
omniscience  might  be  accepted.  Then 
came  his  memorably  explosive  burst  of 
imagination.  Like  all  good  men,  he 
was  humble  in  spirit,  yet  desirous  of 
doing  good.  The  good  he  most  wished 
to  do  was  to  preserve  others  from  the 
[  68  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

intoxicating  enticements  of  specialisa 
tion.  Could  he  do  this  better,  he  asked, 
than  by  consecrating  his  life  to  the 
task  of  instruction  at  some  fresh-water 
college,  where,  with  the  sole  aid  of  his 
encyclopaedia,  he  might  hope  in  due 
time  to  become  the  titular  "  Professor 
of  Everything"? 

Comment  on  this  incident  seems 
needless.  I  have  tried  to  recount  it 
literally,  nothing  extenuating  nor  aught 
setting  down  in  malice.  It  left  me  cer 
tainly  a  sadder  man,  and  perhaps  a 
wiser.  That  boy,  no  doubt,  talked  like 
a  fool;  but,  when  he  went  away,  there 
seemed  to  me  something  else  than  folly 
in  the  memory  of  him.  He  had  dimly 
perceived,  and  in  his  own  stammering 
way  he  had  fearlessly  tried  to  express, 
a  truth  pregnant  for  you  and  me.  For 
if  you  and  I,  as  teachers  or  scholars, 
as  priests  or  initiates  of  the  mystery  of 

[    69    ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

education,  threatened  on  all  sides  by 
unmeaningly  impious  dissipation  of  our 
mystery,  and  bewildered  by  the  accel 
erating  rush  of  environment  all  about 
us,  are  to  give  due  account  of  ourselves 
to  the  future,  we  must  bestir  ourselves 
to  be  dynamic. 

To  be  dynamic  as  teachers,  and  thus, 
so  far  as  we  can,  to  make  dynamic  in 
turn  those  who  come  within  our  influ 
ence,  is  the  earthly  duty  of  our  profes 
sion.  Again,  you  may  well  feel,  I  am 
losing  myself  in  fine,  big  words.  Even 
so,  there  is  comfort  for  us  all  looming 
in  sight.  These  vagaries  have  already 
strayed  so  long  that  they  cannot  stray 
much  longer.  They  may  leave  us  no 
where,  to  be  sure;  if  they  do,  they  will 
have  done  at  worst  only  what  educa 
tion  now  does  to  most  of  its  patients; 
and  few  of  us  yet  are  ready  to  declare 
in  consequence  that  education  is  not 
[  70  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

worth  while.  Indeed,  I  remember  few 
more  inspiring  eulogies  than  that 
which  a  professor  of  my  acquaintance 
once  privately  pronounced  on  a  newly 
departed  colleague.  The  career  just 
gently  closed,  he  declared,  had  been 
among  the  most  memorably  useful  in 
the  whole  history  of  the  field  of  learn 
ing  which  it  had  striven  to  cultivate. 
By  faithful  adherence  to  wrong  meth 
ods,  in  pursuit  of  wrong  ends,  it  had 
conclusively  demonstrated  what  ought 
not  to  be  done.  Next  to  triumphant 
success,  my  friend  declared,  this  is, 
perhaps,  the  highest  achievement  with 
in  the  range  of  human  endeavour.  All 
the  same,  most  of  us  are  ambitious 
enough  to  cling  to  the  last  infirmity 
of  noble  minds,  and  not  to  rest  con 
tent  with  the  prospect  of  a  useful 
ness  based  on  the  fact  that  we  shall 
unintentionally  have  been  useless.  So 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

far  as  we  desire  to  know  what  we  shall 
do  to  be  saved,  accordingly,  we  must 
still  inquire,  though  never  so  hastily, 
what  we  mean  by  dynamic,  as  we  have 
just  used  that  impressive  word. 

Intelligent,  living  lenses,  we  have 
agreed  to  imagine  ourselves,  focally  col 
lecting  and  radiating  certain  streams 
of  the  constantly  accelerating  force 
which  surges  about  us,  no  one  knows 
whence  or  whither;  and  our  function, 
so  far  as  we  are  teachers,  and  priests  or 
initiates  of  the  mystery  of  education, 
is  to  mould  other  lenses  at  once  so 
firmly  and  so  flexibly  that  they  shall  do 
their  own  work  better.  So,  on  and  on, 
to  furthest  time.  All  this  work,  whether 
ours  or  theirs,  is  done  best  when  intelli 
gence  best  selects,  best  combines,  and 
best  radiates — itself  nobly  submissive 
to  the  quiveringly  balanced  conditions 
of  its  task.  Thus  we  have  generalised. 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

All  that  we  can  now  do  more  is  to  at 
tempt,  if  only  for  an  instant,  to  trans 
late  our  generalisation  into  something 
like  specific  terms. 

In  choosing  those  nearest  my  own 
experience,  I  do  only  what  I  should 
eagerly  expect  any  one  else  to  do  un 
der  similar  circumstances.  For  a  good 
many  years  I  have  been  mostly  a 
teacher  of  literature,  whose  business 
has  been,  so  far  as  in  me  lay,  to  under 
stand  it,  and  to  impart  understanding 
of  it  to  others.  Among  those  others, 
year  by  year,  there  have  always  been 
a  few  who  desired  to  become  teachers 
of  literature  themselves;  as  a  rule, 
these  men  have  decided  to  prepare 
themselves  for  their  life  work  by  win 
ning  the  degree  of  Doctor  of  Philosophy. 
Over  and  over  again  we  have  accord 
ingly  found  ourselves  deep  in  discussion 
of  how  such  students  should  concern 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

themselves  with  literature.  If  we  had 
all  agreed  about  anything,  we  should 
not  have  been  human.  Unless  I  am 
wholly  mistaken,  the  while,  hardly  any 
of  us  would  deny  that  literature  is 
among  the  enduring  expressions  of  his 
tory;  that  among  other  expressions  of 
history,  equally  significant  and  mem 
orable,  are  the  other  fine  arts  and  phi 
losophy;  and,  to  go  no  further,  that  the 
vehicle  of  literature  is  language. 

Here,  instantly,  are  other  rays  or 
streams  of  the  force  surging  about  us, 
not  to  be  disdained  or  neglected  by 
those  whose  chief  duty  is  concerned 
with  the  vibrant  rays  of  literature 
alone.  There  was  never  work  of  lit 
erature,  from  the  Homeric  poems  to 
the  yellow  journalism  of  these  United 
States  of  America,  not  the  better  to  be 
understood  for  understanding  of  the 
words  put  together  in  its  making,  of 
[  74  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

the  historical  and  social  conditions  col 
lected  at  the  moment  of  its  utterance, 
or  of  what  men  were  painting  and 
building  and  moulding  and  singing 
and  dreaming  in  the  world  about  it. 
No  doubt,  all  this  is  already  far  too 
much  for  any  man  of  letters  to  gather 
firmly  in  any  conscious  focus.  None 
the  less,  if  he  forget  the  existence 
of  a  single  ray  of  it,  he  forgets  at  his 
peril.  The  most  frequent  phase  of 
such  disaster  used  to  be  the  pedantry 
of  the  grammarians ;  at  present  it  is 
pressed  hard  by  the  gossipy  minuteness 
of  the  antiquarians.  Our  higher  duty  is 
not  to  neglect,  but  to  select,  and  to  re 
ject — that  is,  so  far  as  our  focal  business 
is  cumulative.  Then,  within  our  in 
most  selves,  must  come  the  flash  which 
can  synthesise  into  new  combination 
the  rays  of  force,  from  near  and  far, 
most  needful  for  our  radiant  purpose. 
[  75  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

Finally  must  come  expression — in  no 
wise  an  end  in  itself,  nor  an  idol  to  be 
worshipped  for  intrinsic  monstrosity  or 
grace,  but  an  inevitable  condition  of 
imparting  our  synthesis  to  other  minds 
than  our  own.  We  are  at  our  best  when 
we  select  best,  when  we  best  fuse  anew 
the  vagrant  rays  which  we  have  select 
ed,  and  when  our  expression  flows 
forth  with  the  clear  white  heat  of  fresh 
and  living  fusion. 

So,  at  least,  it  has  come  to  seem  to 
me,  after  thirty  years  of  plodding  work, 
none  too  fruitful.  There  is  left  us  only 
the  question  of  how  we  should  apply 
all  this  to  the  patients  in  our  charge, 
suffering  until  we  can  turn  them  adrift 
with  what  hope  of  survival  may  inhere 
in  the  mystic  letters  Ph.D.  The  answer 
is  short  and,  for  a  wonder,  simple. 
Doctors  of  philosophy  must  earn  their 
degrees  chiefly  by  writing  theses.  So 
[  76  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

far  as  these  theses  can  stimulate  at 
once  intelligent  power  of  selection,  of 
fusion,  and  of  expression,  they  are 
priceless  means  of  education.  So  far 
as  they  either  exaggerate  or  repress  in 
telligence,  or  selective  power,  or  power 
of  fusion,  or  expression  itself,  they  may 
begin  to  do  more  harm  than  good;  and 
harm,  like  good,  and  everything  else, 
is  infinite  in  its  possibilities.  Concern 
ing  the  present  condition  of  such  theses 
I  will  not  further  inquire.  What  the 
future  condition  of  them  might  con 
ceivably  be  we  will  leave  to  the  dream 
ers. 

Whereof  you  will  more  than  prob 
ably  have  found  me  one.  Imperfectly 
focal,  I  fear,  and  dimly  radiant  this 
effort  of  mine  to  set  forth  opinion  must 
seem.  All  I  can  urge  in  excuse  for 
having  made  such  demand  on  your 
attention  is  the  tremendous  truth  that 
[  77  ] 


THE  MYSTERY  OF  EDUCATION 

this  mystery  of  ours — the  mystery  of 
education — still  retains  the  marvellous 
power  of  commanding  enthusiastic  na 
tional  faith.  To  any  of  us  who  have 
come  to  feel  this,  and  therewith  the 
gravity  of  our  responsibility,  no  earnest 
effort  to  confront  it  can  seem  a  waste 
of  time.  So  if  any  of  you  have  found 
food  for  thought  in  my  belief  that  our 
real  task  is  the  fashioning  of  living 
lenses  which  shall  intelligently  accu 
mulate  and  radiate  streams  of  the  accel 
erating  force  in  which  we  are  all  surging 
toward  we  know  not  what,  our  hour 
together  is  justified.  For  it  will  have 
done  its  own  little  part  to  encourage 
our  mystery  toward  the  high  hope  that 
in  the  years  to  come  education  may 
help  make  human  forces  not  explosive 
but  constructive. 


Ill 

THE    STUDY   OF   LITERATURE 

An  Address  before  the  Public  School  Teachers  of 
Chicago,  opening  the  Elizabeth  Kirkland  Me 
morial  Lectureship,  in  January,  1908;  repeated 
in  substance  before  the  Women's  College  in 
Brown  University,  27  April,  1909. 


Ill 

THE    STUDY   OF   LITERATURE 

MR.  PRESIDENT,  LADIES  AND  GENTLE 
MEN: 

The  privilege  of  opening  this  course  of 
lectures  is  great  and  grave.*  Of  all 
human  careers  that  of  a  teacher  some 
times  seems  the  most  desperately  mo 
mentary;  to  any  teacher,  at  least,  the 
course  of  daily  work  must  often  appear 
no  better  than  a  changeless  recurrence 
of  monotonously  repetitory  routine. 
As  year  by  year,  too,  pupils  pass  beyond 
the  horizon  of  a  teacher's  vision,  this 

*  The  Elizabeth  Kirkland  Memorial  Lectureship 
was  founded  by  the  pupils  of  the  late  Miss  Kirkland 
to  provide  occasional  lectures  for  the  benefit  of 
teachers  in  the  Public  Schools  of  Chicago. 

[    81   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

routine  must  almost  inevitably  appear 
to  be  not  only  benumbing  but  fruitless. 
With  each  new  class  you  find  yourself 
just  where  you  began  with  the  last,  till 
perforce  you  fall  to  wondering  whether 
anybody  can  ever  get  anywhere,  or  be 
of  any  use  whatsoever.  By  the  mere 
fact  of  its  existence,  such  a  foundation 
as  the  Elizabeth  Kirkland  Memorial 
Lectureship  must  therefore  be  a  con 
stant  source  of  incalculable  encourage 
ment.  It  implies  that  the  faithful  life  of 
one  earnest  teacher  has  borne  the  fruit 
of  living  and  loving  memory;  that  the 
influence  of  it  is  passing  beyond  the  limi 
tations  of  any  momentary  human  con 
ditions;  that  it  has  kindled  aspiration 
toward  ends  vaster,  higher,  more  stim- 
ulatingly  remote  from  the  deadening  re 
alities  of  daily  labour  than  any  ends,  or 
pensions,  which  such  labour  can  visibly 
attain.  So  those  of  us  who  come,  from 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

time  to  time,  charged  with  the  happy 
duty  of  keeping  this  aspiration  freshly 
alive,  of  bearing  some  message  from  a 
beloved  teacher  of  the  past  to  faithful 
teachers  of  the  present  and  of  the  fu 
ture,  are  truly  missionaries. 

The  mission  with  which  we  are 
charged,  the  while,  is  in  its  very  essence 
immaterial — a  matter  not  of  the  body 
but  of  the  spirit.  There  was  no  need 
of  a  caution  kindly  given  me  with  the 
summons  which  has  brought  me  hither 
— that  this  is  not  the  moment,  if  in 
deed  there  ever  could  be  a  fit  moment, 
for  dwelling  on  such  matters  as  the 
fashion  of  our  pedagogic  brethren  now 
calls  equipment  or  methods.  For  my 
own  part,  I  am  rather  disposed  to  think 
all  such  discussion  abortive.  A  good 
workman  needs  few  tools ;  a  good 
teacher  can  teach  anyhow  and  any 
where  ;  no  equipment  or  methods  can 
[  83  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

ever  take  the  place,  or  much  alter  the 
place,  of  the  one  quality  which  any 
good  teacher  must  essentially  possess. 
The  quality,  to  be  sure,  is  so  hard  to 
name  that  I  shall  not  vex  you  with 
efforts  to  decide  what  to  call  it.  The 
effect  of  it  any  one  can  see,  wherever  it 
shines,  in  the  instinctive  and  persistent 
attitude  of  pupils.  Pupils  will  always 
recognise  a  good  teacher  as  their  supe 
rior — their  superior  surely  in  all  matters 
related  to  work  with  which  they  are 
engaged  together,  and  their  superior  as 
well,  if  the  superiority  is  to  have  endur 
ing  influence,  in  the  more  subtle 
yet  equally  certain  matters  of  mind 
and  of  character.  For  your  good 
teacher,  of  whatever  grade,  must  be 
a  leader,  and  a  leader  so  securely 
confident  that  pupils  shall  follow  not 
reluctantly  or  by  force  of  discipline, 
but  eagerly. 

[  84  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

Your  good  teacher,  too,  must  be  a 
leader  of  pupils  who,  if  they  continue 
their  work  of  study  to  the  point  where 
it  approaches  maturity,  will  by  and  by, 
in  the  full  glory  of  university  standing, 
come  to  be  called  by  the  name  of  stu 
dents.  Dulled  though  that  word  may 
be  by  the  unenlivened  commonplace 
of  its  daily  use,  the  evident  meaning  of 
it  leads  us  straight  toward  the  vital 
spirit  of  such  life-work  as  is  ours, 
teachers  together.  It  is  our  business  to 
make  our  pupils — avowed  students 
when  they  get  to  college,  and  virtually 
students  from  the  childish  moment 
when  they  first  come  within  our  influ 
ence — strengthen  in  themselves  the 
qualities  which  shall  make  their  work 
of  study  not  dead  but  alive,  not  me 
chanical  but  intelligent,  not  benumbing 
but  effective.  To  accomplish  this,  I 
believe — so  far  as  accomplishment  may 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

lie  within  our  powers — there  is  only 
one  way.  We  ourselves  must  never 
cease  to  be  students,  too.  We  must 
grow  increasingly  older  than  our  pu 
pils,  of  course,  and  if  so  may  be,  in 
creasingly  wiser;  but  neither  age  nor 
wisdom  should  ever  check — rather, 
both  age  and  wisdom  should  forever 
impel — our  aspiration,  as  the  days  pass, 
and  the  months,  and  the  years,  to  know 
more  and  more.  We  should  not  only 
long  unceasingly  to  learn  more  of  the 
precise  matters  with  which  our  daily 
work  is  concerned;  more  resolutely 
still,  and  in  far  greater  degree,  we 
should  constantly  strive  to  possess  our 
selves  of  the  truths  and  the  mysteries 
which  lie  highly  beyond  the  initiatory 
drudgeries  of  our  brief,  unsatisfactory 
class  rooms. 

If  these  words  seem  too  big  to  mean 
much,  we  can  soon  translate  them  into 
[   86   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

simpler  terms.  Just  so  far  as  our  teach 
ing  makes  pupils  eager  to  know  more 
than  we  have  time  or  power  to  teach 
them,  it  is  a  constructive  force  in  their 
lives.  Just  so  far  as  this  work  leaves 
us  ourselves  humbly  yet  courageously 
aware  of  how  much  more  we  need  to 
master  before  we  can  begin  to  do  it  a 
bit  as  it  ought  to  be  done,  it  is  a  con 
structive  force  in  ours.  True  study 
keeps  us  always  students,  one  and  all, 
untiring  in  our  search  for  knowledge 
and  for  the  fruit  thereof.  Knowledge 
alone  may,  perhaps,  be  much — an  ad 
mirable  and  wonderful  treasury  of  facts, 
of  methods,  of  excellent  and  far  from 
useless  detail ;  but  knowledge  alone  can 
never  be  an  inspiring  ideal.  To  grow 
into  a  living  force,  it  must  merge  itself 
in  the  more  personal,  more  human 
ideal  of  wisdom.  Gossip,  as  some 
learned  authority  has  told  us,  is  not 
[  87  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

history ;  so  long  as  you  know  facts  only 
apart,  even  though  you  know  the  whole 
encyclopaedia  by  heart,  you  know  noth 
ing  but  gossip ;  begin  to  think  even  two 
separate  facts  together,  and  you  have 
begun  your  understanding  of  history. 
Our  true  task  is  not  of  accumulation 
but  of  synthesis,  of  philosophy.  We 
must  know  our  facts,  beyond  doubt; 
but  we  must  not  thereupon  rest  content. 
We  must  never  cease  our  willing  effort 
to  perceive  them  in  constantly  new 
lights,  as  we  come  to  see  them,  more 
and  more,  not  separately  but  in  their 
mutual  relations. 

Now  so  far  as  these  general  consid 
erations  have  truth  or  sense  in  them, 
they  are  clearly  true  of  study  or  of 
teaching  throughout  the  whole  range 
of  either.  They  might  be  illustrated, 
by  considering  the  normal,  or,  if  you 
prefer,  the  ideal  course  of  development 
[  88  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF   LITERATURE 

in  any  range  of  learning  whatsoever. 
Each  of  us  may  accordingly  turn  con 
fidently  for  illustration  to  the  matters 
with  which  he  is  familiar.  This  is 
why,  professionally  occupied  with  lit 
erature,  I  shall  not  scruple  to  confine 
your  attention  to  that  field.  What  we 
may  perceive  there  is  virtually  the 
same  that  we  might  perceive  anywhere 
else,  if  we  gave  ourselves  over  to  the 
guidance  of  some  one  elsewhere  ex 
pert.  The  test  of  living  study  is  that 
it  shall  stimulate  curiosity,  aspiration, 
and  willing,  almost  spontaneous  effort. 
So  the  study  of  literature  is  living,  with 
pupils  and  with  teachers  alike,  when  it 
keeps  them,  each  in  his  degree,  not 
content  to  lay  aside  books  when  a  task 
is  done,  but  eager,  from  the  very  im 
petus  of  the  task,  to  know  literature, 
far  and  wide,  and  if  so  may  be,  to 
make  it. 

[  89   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

Among  American  teachers  of  the 
present  day,  however,  I  fear  we  must  all 
agree,  the  study  of  literature  generally 
begins  in  a  far  from  alluring  form.  Un 
less  my  experience  and  observation  are 
blindly  limited,  such  of  us  as  are  called 
on  to  devote  our  lives  to  this  subject, 
which  ought  to  be  inspiring,  find  our 
humane  enthusiasm  terribly  chilled  by 
insistent  demands  for  work  so  remote 
from  our  ideals  that  it  may  well  seem 
apart  from  them  altogether.  Eager 
though  we  may  be  to  impart  the  secret 
of  the  spirit  of  letters,  we  are  required, 
during  our  early  professional  years  and 
sometimes  during  our  whole  teaching 
lives,  to  attempt  instruction  in  English 
composition,  and  thus  to  add  our  own 
shortcomings  to  the  innumerable  and 
various  shortcomings  throughout  the 
past  of  those  who  have  heroically  at 
tempted  to  impart  to  unwilling  Ameri- 
[  90  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

can  youth  the  secret  of  expressing  it 
self  in  its  native  language. 

To  any  conscientious  teacher,  how 
ever  hopeful  or  despairing  of  approach 
to  success,  this  work  must  often  grow 
to  seem  inhibitory  of  all  else,  stultify 
ing,  in  certain  moods  a  devoted  suicide 
of  mind  and  spirit.  Nothing  can  pre 
vent  it,  honestly  done,  from  resolving 
itself  into  infinite  recurrence  of  petty 
detail,  inevitable  and  almost  mechan 
ical.  I  have  known  a  professor,  in 
one  of  our  older  colleges,  who  had  to 
correct  hundreds  of  themes  a  month, 
who  was  said  to  do  so  with  punctilious 
accuracy,  and  who  has  been  heard  to 
assert  that  the  one  circumstance  which 
enabled  him  to  preserve  his  reason 
through  this  arduously  obscure  career 
was  that  he  could  read  themes  punctili 
ously  for  hours  without  any  conscious 
ness  of  what  either  he  or  they  were 
[  91  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

about.  By  some  dispensation  of  divine 
grace  he  could  put  to  sleep  all  but  the 
theme-reading  faculty  which  had  nearly 
become  to  him,  at  least  professionally, 
the  only  visible  end  and  aim  of  tedi 
ously  despairing  earthly  life. 

No  distortion  of  human  nature  could 
be  much  more  abortive  than  that  into 
which  this  good  man  thus  came  near 
falling.  Detail,  to  be  sure,  is  never 
negligible.  We  neglect  it  at  our  peril, 
not  only  in  such  grave  matters  as  our 
educational  work,  but  in  table  man 
ners,  or  in  clothes.  There  is  a  certain 
positive  importance  in  forks  and  in 
tooth-brushes.  When  details,  how 
ever,  come  to  seem  the  chief  facts  of 
human  existence, — when  you  find  your 
self,  for  example,  disposed  to  believe 
that  the  manner  in  which  fellow-beings 
hold  their  knives  or  punctuate  their 
paragraphs  is  primarily  vital  to  the 
[Ml 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

welfare  of  the  universe, — you  may  feel 
sadly  sure  that  you  are  well  on  your 
way  to  accept  a  scheme  of  life  untrue 
for  want  of  immensity.  That  way  lies 
atrophy.  We  can  see  the  gauntness 
thereof  in  pupils,  or  in  ourselves,  when 
either  of  us  begins  to  imagine  that  the 
chief  end  of  our  effort  to  compose  is 
the  obedient  observance  of  accepted 
rules. 

Something  else  than  gauntness,  on 
the  other  hand,  will  gleam  inspiritingly 
before  us  all,  teachers  and  pupils  alike, 
in  those  rarer  moments  when  for  a 
little  while  we  can  perceive  the  real 
place  of  detail  or  of  rule  in  the  whole 
structure  of  vigorous  learning.  To 
most  of  us  such  moments  come  only 
at  sadly  remote  intervals;  clear  vision 
can  persist  only  with  a  very  few.  The 
most  bewildered  of  us,  however,  can 
sometimes  feel  that,  in  their  proper 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

places,  rules  and  details  are  priceless; 
that  their  places  are  those  wherein  they 
can  aid  us  toward  the  one  ideal  end  of 
all  study  of  composition ;  and  that  this 
ideal  end  is  expression  as  nearly  ade 
quate  as  our  earthly  powers  can  make 
it.  There  is  no  deeper  folly  than  that 
which  would  maintain  literary  art  to 
stop  short  when  it  reaches  the  lower 
limits  of  poetry,  or  of  imaginative 
creation.  In  its  own  lesser  way  a  let 
ter,  an  examination  book,  a  college 
thesis — or  whatever  else  your  poetaster 
would  most  disdain — may  surely  be 
a  work  of  art,  and  as  a  work  of  art  a 
thing  of  beauty.  Whenever  we  can 
assert  it  exquisitely  adapted  to  its  pur 
pose,  slight  and  fleeting  though  that 
purpose  be,  we  may  honestly  delight  in 
it  as  a  fragment  of  literature. 

If  teachers   or   students   of  English 
composition  can  make  themselves  thus 

[   94    ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

view  the  work  before  them,  that  work 
takes  on  a  new  and  a  brighter  aspect. 
Even  their  benumbingly  recurrent  ex 
perience  of  technical  detail,  unconse- 
crated  by  the  reverend  traditions  which 
make  the  minutiae  of  the  classical  gram 
mars  a  mysterious  initiation  into  the 
communion  of  ancestral  learning,  can 
come  to  be  an  incentive  toward  the 
making  of  literature — of  "the  lasting 
expression  in  words  of  the  meaning  of 
life."  Unless  we  can  feel  the  end  of 
composition  to  be  the  making  of  liter 
ature,  I  believe,  any  student  thereof, 
teacher  or  pupil,  must  find  the  task  be 
fore  him  despairing,  withering,  mortal. 
The  moment  any  of  us  can  steadfastly 
perceive  the  true  height  of  our  purpose, 
however,  a  new  vista  opens.  There 
are  limitless  fields  for  us  to  explore — 
limitless  regions  for  alert  study,  vagrant 
or  systematic,  as  the  case  maybe.  Who- 
[  95  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

ever  is  even  remotely  concerned  with  the 
making  of  literature  is  confronted  with 
a  task  which  should  put  his  highest 
powers  to  the  test.  For  thus,  whatever 
our  accomplishment,  we  begin  to  meas 
ure  ourselves 'with  those  who  have  ap 
proached  success  in  the  fine  art  wherein 
we  find  ourselves  bravely  experimental. 
So  far  as  we,  here  and  now,  are  ever  to 
make  literature  at  all,  we  can  soon  see, 
we  shall  contribute  our  own  part,  great 
or  small,  to  the  already  extensive  liter 
ature  of  America. 

Very  likely,  for  some  little  time  past, 
these  observations  of  mine  may  have 
seemed  aimlessly  vagrant.  Pretending 
to  invite  you  to  listen  to  some  consider 
ations  concerning  the  study  of  literature, 
I  have  first  indulged  myself  in  rather 
elusive  generalisations,  and  have  then 
discussed,  in  none  too  enthusiastic  tem 
per,  a  matter  so  remote  from  literature 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

in  our  daily  lives  as  the  teaching  of 
boys  and  girls  how  to  write  the  English 
language.  If  I  be  not  all  in  error,  the 
while,  I  have  led  you  along  a  road  more 
regular  than  it  may  have  seemed. 
Regular,  I  mean,  because,  at  least  so  far 
as  I  have  been  able  to  observe,  most 
of  us  who  have  been  engaged  anywhere 
in  the  teaching  of  composition,  have 
found  ourselves,  often  with  little  special 
preparation  for  the  task,  called  upon 
to  teach  as  well — or  as  ill,  if  you  prefer, 
— something  about  the  literature  of  our 
native  country.  The  two  things  some 
how  hang  together. 

In  itself  this  new  call  is  stimulating. 
It  opens  for  us  new  fields  of  exploration, 
far  more  invigorating  than  those  where 
we  have  begun  to  labour.  The  very 
extent  of  their  range,  though,  is  bewil 
dering,  and  bewildering  most  of  all  to 
faithful  spirits  who  have  come,  from 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

sad  experience,  to  believe  or  to  as 
sume  that  honest  work,  exploratory  or 
cultivating,  must  always  be  a  matter  of 
conscientious  detail.  We  have  gener 
alised  so  much  that  I  shall  ask  no  in 
dulgence  for  illustrating  what  I  mean 
by  a  specific  instance.  Not  very  long 
ago  I  received  from  a  polite  stranger 
somewhere  in  the  West  a  letter  of  which 
the  gently  diffident  temper  was  implied 
by  a  postage  stamp,  duly  enclosed,  to 
expedite  my  reply.  The  writer,  it  ap 
peared,  was  a  student,  occupied,  while 
pursuing  some  study  of  what  he  called 
American  Literature,  with  the  prepa 
ration  of  a  paper  about  James  Russell 
Lowell. 

Now,  as  a  matter  of  familiar  and  ac 
knowledged  fact,  Lowell  was  a  mem 
ber  of  the  class  of  1838  at  Harvard 
College,  where  he  was  duly  elected,  or 
appointed,  class  poet.  He  accordingly 

[   98   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

wrote  a  class  poem,  in  no  wise  mem 
orable,  which  was  subsequently  printed 
in  a  small  pamphlet,  dear  to  collectors 
by  reason  of  his  subsequent  and  de 
served  eminence.  It  is  also  true  that  he 
got  into  some  sort  of  trouble  with  the 
college  authorities.  There  is  a  legend, 
I  know  not  how  authoritative,  that  a 
grave  and  reverend  personage,  conduct 
ing  college  prayers,  closed  his  eyes  as  he 
lifted  face  and  voice  in  petition  to  our 
Creator ;  that,  upon  some  eloquent 
reference  in  his  prayer  to  his  aspirations 
for  the  undergraduates  collected  at  his 
feet,  one  of  them  politely  bowed,  as  an 
acknowledgment  of  this  intercessory 
courtesy;  that  other  students  godlessly 
tittered ;  and  that  the  devout  divine, 
thereupon  opening  one  or  both  of  his 
eyes,  discerned  the  urbanely  saluting 
figure  of  young  Lowell,  who  was  pres 
ently  rusticated  in  consequence. 

[   99    ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

The  story  may  be  quite  apocryphal. 
Something  or  other,  however, — and 
something  not  in  the  least  disgraceful, — 
certainly  clouded  the  serenity  of  Low 
ell's  undergraduate  relations  with  the 
college  authorities.  This  fact  is  touched 
on,  I  believe,  in  various  biographical 
notices  of  this  distinguished  man  of  let 
ters,  some  of  which  state  that  it  pre 
vented  him  from  delivering  his  class 
poem;  others  of  which  intimate  that 
the  poem  was  duly  read  in  public,  de 
spite  his  discipline.  This  divergence 
of  opinion  happened  to  excite  the  in 
terest  of  my  Western  correspondent;  he 
wrote  to  inquire  whether  Lowell's  class 
poem,  accessible  in  print,  was  duly  de 
livered  or  not,  in  1838.  My  answer, 
I  fear,  displeased  him;  for,  perhaps  be 
cause  of  my  neglect  to  enclose  a  stamp, 
he  never  did  me  the  kindness  to  ac 
knowledge  it.  In  substance,  it  was  that 
f  100  1 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

I  had  no  idea  whether  the  poem  was 
actually  given  before  a  duly  assembled 
audience  or  not;  that  the  general  cir 
cumstances  of  Lowell's  boyish  temper, 
the  only  thing  which  could  make  the 
question  interesting,  were  admitted  by 
everybody  ;  and  that  any  student  who 
should  waste  his  time  on  so  immaterial 
a  question  of  detail  ran  the  risk  of 
never  knowing  why  Lowell,  or  any 
other  American  man  of  letters,  should 
be  any  more  worth  writing  about  than 
if  they  had  never  written  a  paragraph. 
Quite  possibly,  some  of  you  may 
think  this  line  of  comment  heartlessly 
unsympathetic.  I  did  not  mean  it  so. 
To  my  mind,  it  was  the  best  lesson 
which,  as  an  honest  teacher  of  litera 
ture  in  America,  I  could  give  off-hand 
to  an  earnest  student  of  this  not  too 
comprehensive  phase  of  human  expres 
sion.  One  might  fairly  assume  that 

I  101  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

his  true  purpose  was  to  possess  himself 
of  the  body,  and  if  so  might  be  of  the 
spirit  as  well,  of  those  American  pub 
lications  which  together  have  proved 
themselves  lasting  enough  to  be  re 
garded  as  enduring  literature.  Any 
question  of  gossipy  personal  detail, 
just  like  any  considerable  study  of 
ephemeral  or  trivial  or  obsolete  writings 
produced  at  any  time  by  our  fellow- 
countrymen,  would  thus  be  a  danger 
ous  distraction.  The  details  of  Lowell's 
college  scrape  had  no  more  to  do  with 
what  makes  Lowell  memorable  than 
had  the  breed  of  the  hens  whose  eggs  he 
habitually  ate  for  breakfast  at  the  age 
of  ten.  Whoever  supposed  that  they 
had,  was  as  far  from  intelligent  study  of 
the  real  literature  of  our  country  as  if 
he  were  wasting  precious  time  on  the 
Puritan  sermons  of  the  Seventeenth 
Century,  or  on  the  scribblings  of  good 
[  102  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

men  who  tried  to  make  literature  be 
tween  the  Revolution  and  the  year 
1800.  The  best  advice  I  knew  how  to 
give  any  earnest  student  of  our  literary 
history  was  to  back  out  of  these  thick 
ets,  and  once  in  the  open  to  ask  him 
self,  without  any  distraction  of  detail, 
what  the  literature  of  America  really  is. 
To  this  question,  the  answer  is  at 
once  so  clear  and  so  evident  that  you 
will  find  half  the  students  who  ought  to 
know  it — teachers  and  pupils  alike — 
groping  in  the  dark.  Beyond  perad- 
venture,  the  memorable  literature  of 
America — and  therefore  the  only  litera 
ture  of  America  as  yet  worth  general 
study — is  that  part  of  English  literature 
which  was  produced  in  the  United 
States  during  the  first  three-quarters  of 
the  Nineteenth  Century.  What  came 
before  is  clearly  of  no  more  than  his 
torical  interest;  what  has  ensued  is  still 
[  103  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

too  near  us  for  ultimate  critical  classi 
fication. 

A  part  of  English  literature  I  have 
called  the  literature  of  our  country,  for 
the  obvious  reason  that  it  is  written  in 
the  English  language;  and  thus,  in  its 
own  way,  is  as  integral  a  part  of  Eng 
lish  literature  as  the  Idyls  of  Theoc 
ritus  are  a  part  of  Greek.  When  we 
consider  any  literature  so  broadly  as 
we  are  considering  our  subject  now, — 
or  as  I  believe  that  any  wise  teacher 
may  best  make  ignorant  but  curious 
pupils  consider  it,  to  begin  with, — we 
can  wisely  touch  only  on  the  writers 
who  have  emerged  and  have  endured 
as  important.  When  we  thus  consider 
the  literature  of  America,  we  shall 
accordingly  find  not  only  that  its  pres 
ent  limits  are  no  more  extensive  than 
I  have  just  stated,  but  that  within 
those  limits  there  are  as  yet  only  ten 
[  104  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

indisputably  memorable  names.  These 
names,  already  familiar  everywhere, 
bid  fair  to  stay  so.  They  are  the 
names  of  Irving  and  Cooper,  of  Bryant 
and  Poe;  and  of  Emerson,  Longfellow, 
Lowell,  Holmes,  Whittier,  and  Haw 
thorne. 

Some,  I  know,  would  clamorously 
add  to  the  list  that  of  Walt  Whitman. 
Add  it,  if  you  like;  to  my  mind  he  is 
too  eccentric,  and  too  far  from  any 
thing  like  popular  appeal  to  his  com 
patriots,  for  any  such  certainty  of 
distinction.  If  urgently  bidden  to  in 
crease  the  company,  I  should  be  far 
more  disposed  to  add  the  more  gracious 
and  beautiful  name  of  Sidney  Lanier. 
This  very  budding  dispute  will  go  far,  I 
think,  to  prove  the  accuracy  of  the  list 
I  have  ventured  to  set  down  as  un 
questionably  deserving  our  attention. 
Other  writers  than  these  ten  are  not 
[  105  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

to  be  neglected  or  altogether  forgotten ; 
no  more  are  other  periods  than  those 
in  which  these  ten  lived  and  moved 
and  had  their  being  and  did  their 
work.  In  such  broadly  general  con 
siderations  as  ours,  however,  other 
periods  in  our  literary  history  and 
other  American  writers  may  best  be 
regarded,  almost  like  the  boyish  pranks 
of  Lowell,  as  matters  of  detail.  They 
are  to  be  thought  of,  if  at  all,  and  in  that 
case  to  be  thought  with,  not  as  primarily 
important,  but  only  so  far  as  they  can 
help  us  to  define  our  impressions  of  the 
few  works  and  authors  acknowledged  to 
be  our  most  characteristic  and  our  best. 
Their  function,  in  such  study  as  we  are 
now  concerned  with,  is  to  help  us  un 
derstand  the  nature  of  the  approach  to 
excellence  made  by  the  Americans  whose 
writings  are  most  nearly  excellent. 
These  by  themselves  are  enough  and  to 
[  106  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

spare  for  all  but  exceptionally  well-in 
formed  students.  Repeat  the  ten  names 
again  if  you  will.  You  can  hardly  help 
feeling  a  glow  of  patriotic  complacency, 
as  they  remind  you  of  what  pure- 
hearted  work  our  country  has  added, 
during  the  century  lately  past,  to  the 
literature  of  the  English  language. 

If  I  have  seemed  to  repeat  that  ref 
erence  to  the  literature  of  the  Eng 
lish  language  unduly,  the  point  at 
which  we  have  now  arrived  may,  per 
haps,  win  me  justification.  Any  vital 
study,  I  hope  we  are  agreed,  must  lead 
us  beyond  its  own  limits.  Thus,  a  little 
while  ago,  we  discovered  that  vital 
study  of  English  Composition  in  Amer 
ica  would  lead  us  almost  insensibly  to 
study  of  our  national  literature.  Now, 
very  little  later,  we  discover  that  the 
study  of  literature  in  America  will 
similarly  lead  us,  half  unawares,  to  the 
[  107  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

consideration,  and  probably  to  the 
study  as  well,  of  the  whole  range  of 
English  literature  throughout  the  Nine 
teenth  Century. 

A  moment  ago,  we  indulged  ourselves 
in  the  pleasure  of  patriotic  compla 
cency,  as  we  surveyed  the  work  of  the 
ten  American  men  of  letters  who  have 
emerged  superior  to  their  contempo 
raries.  Complacency  does  one  good 
only  if  it  stop  short  of  fatuousness.  This 
reference  to  the  literature  of  England 
may  thus  prove  tonic.  Our  eminent 
literary  worthies  were  not  only  con 
temporaries  of  our  somewhat  less  dis 
tinguished  compatriots  whom  we  have 
not  troubled  ourselves  to  recall  by 
name.  They  were  men,  too,  of  the 
century  which  added  to  English  liter 
ature  the  works  of  Wordsworth,  of 
Coleridge,  of  Shelley,  of  Keats,  of  By 
ron,  and  of  Scott;  of  Tennyson  and  of 
[  108  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

Browning;  of  Dickens,  of  Thackeray, 
and  of  George  Eliot ;  and,  to  go  no 
further,  of  Macaulay,  of  Carlyle,  and 
of  Ruskin.  The  list  might  extend  far 
longer;  as  it  stands,  it  is  enough  for 
our  purposes,  corrective  and  scholarly 
alike.  By  the  side  of  their  English  ri 
vals  the  glories  of  our  American  constel 
lation  do  not  shine  so  supremely  bright 
as  we  let  ourselves  fancy  when  we  con 
templated  them  alone.  They  are  not 
quenched,  nor  even  quite  dimmed ;  only 
their  magnitude  no  longer  seems  so 
positively  imposing  as  we  had  fancied. 
To  put  the  case  at  its  mildest,  the  Eng 
lish  literature  of  the  Nineteenth  Century 
is  quite  as  significant  as  the  literature 
of  America,  in  which  we  were  tempted 
to  take  perhaps  overweening  pride. 

What   is   more,   we   must   presently 
admit,   the  English    literature    of    the 
Nineteenth  Century  by  no  means  com- 
[  109  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

prises  all  the  literature  of  what  we  still 
regard  as  our  Mother  Country.  Taken 
by  itself,  to  be  sure,  it  seems  quite  as 
important  as  the  whole  literature  of 
America,  from  the  beginning  to  this 
day.  Yet  before  the  eldest  of  the  Eng 
lishmen  whom  we  have  named  wrote 
a  line,  English  literature  possessed 
names  in  plenty  at  least  as  memorable 
as  his.  A  very  few  of  them,  taken  al 
most  at  random,  should  serve  our  pur 
pose  now.  When  Wordsworth  was 
born,  English  literature  already  pos 
sessed  the  work  of  Johnson,  for  exam 
ple,  of  Pope,  of  Addison,  of  Dryden,  of 
Milton,  of  Bacon,  of  Shakspere,  of 
Spenser,  and  of  Chaucer. 

The  very  mention  of  these  names  w^ill 
already  have  reminded  you  of  a  hun 
dred  others  \vhom  we  cannot  pause  to 
recognize,  one  by  one.  It  will  have  re 
minded  you,  too,  of  other  matters  than 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

individual  authors  which  must  be  duly 
considered  by  any  vital  study  of  English 
literature :  the  Periodical  Essay,  for  one 
thing;  the  Elizabethan  Drama,  for 
another;  and  for  a  third,  the  romantic 
poetry  of  the  glowing  Middle  Ages. 
At  due  times  and  seasons,  these  and 
their  like  may  well  occupy  studious 
years  or  careers.  What  concerns  us 
at  this  moment,  however,  is  rather  the 
general  question  which  begins  to  de 
fine  itself  stimulatingly  and  surely 
above  and  beyond  other  questions  and 
lesser.  Where,  we  must  surely  find  our 
selves  wondering,  does  this  English  lit 
erature  belong,  whereof  our  own  liter 
ature  of  America  is  only  one  little  part  ? 
What  is  its  final  place,  superb  though 
it  be  by  itself,  in  the  whole  scheme  of 
literature  toward  perception  of  which 
the  course  of  our  study  is  beginning  to 
lead  us  ? 

t  in  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

Thus  considering  English  literature, 
we  can  presently  discern  it  as  one,  and 
as  only  one,  of  at  least  five  still  vigorous 
literatures  which  now  constitute  the 
fundamental  literature  of  Europe.  We 
need  hardly  stop  to  name  them — the 
literatures  of  France,  of  Italy,  of  Spain, 
of  Germany,  and  this  of  our  old  an 
cestral  England.  Nebulous  in  their 
beginnings,  they  have  all  come  into  their 
full  existence  during  the  past  six  hun 
dred  years.  What  is  more,  in  the  course 
of  their  separately  contemporaneous 
development  they  have  incessantly  and 
intricately  interacted  from  their  begin 
nings  even  unto  this  day.  A  long  way 
we  may  now  seem  from  the  Puritan  pul 
pits  of  New  England,  from  American 
poetasters  of  the  Eighteenth  Century, 
from  Lowell's  class  poem,  delivered  or 
not  as  the  case  may  be  in  that  fading 
summer  of  1838,  or  from  problems  as 
[  112  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

to  when  you  should  use  shall  and  when 
will.  Yet  the  road  we  have  travelled 
has  been  straight  from  that  dreary  hol 
low  of  our  daily  school-rooms  to  this 
height  where  we  are  seeking  to  discern, 
in  full  open  air,  no  longer  what  Ameri 
can  literature  is — if,  indeed,  America 
can  as  yet  be  said  to  possess  anything 
quite  worthy  of  so  portentous  a  name— 
nor  yet  what  English  literature  is,  in 
its  whole  broad  compass,  but  rather 
what  that  greater  fact  is,  which  com 
prises  them  both  and  so  much  more, 
too, — the  lasting  literature  of  Europe. 

Beyond  attempting  an  answer  to  this 
question  I  shall  not  pretend  to  guide 
your  thoughts,  or  further  to  trouble 
you,  to-day.  Slight,  elementary,  obvi 
ous  though  the  answer  be,  it  should 
serve,  I  think,  the  chief  purpose  of  our 
present  conference.  This  is  to  assure 
ourselves  that  just  as  when  the  snares 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

of  detail  entangle  the  course  of  the  spirit 
the  study  of  literature  is  inhumanly  be 
numbing,  so  when  we  can  shake  our 
selves  free  from  them  this  same  study 
reveals  itself  as  quiveringly  human,  in 
exhaustibly  stimulating.  It  is  my  hope 
that  I  may  indicate  to  you,  though  never 
so  slightly,  where  you  and  I,  who  give 
our  lives  to  teaching  in  modern  Amer 
ica,  have  our  own  little  place  in  the 
great  whole  of  the  literature  of  Europe. 
If  so,  we  shall  not  have  wasted  the  time 
we  shall  have  passed  together. 

Broadly  speaking,  any  one  can  see, 
the  literature  of  Europe  is  divided  into 
two  distinct  parts,  or  perhaps  three, 
which  together  express  the  meaning  of 
life  as  life  has  revealed  itself  to  the 
European  mind  during  the  past  twenty- 
five  hundred  years.  The  two  completely 
distinct  parts  are  commonly  called  an 
cient  and  modern;  between  them  is  a 
[  114  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

long  interval,  not  so  clearly  defined  in 
literature  as  that  which  preceded  or  as 
that  which  has  ensued  ;  its  transitional 
obscurity,  fascinatingly  indistinct,  com 
bines  with  its  position  in  historic  time 
to  give  it  the  conventional  name  of 
mediaeval.  Antiquity,  as  expressed  in 
literature,  was  purely  European.  The 
Middle  Ages  was  a  period  when  the 
other  than  European  tradition  of  the 
Christian  religion  fused  with  the  pre 
viously  unmixed  traditions  of  antique 
Europe.  Modernity  remains  a  period 
when  people  sprung  from  generations  of 
these  fused  traditions  have  attempted, 
in  various  ways  and  with  various  de 
grees  of  success,  to  revive  something  like 
the  antique  purity  of  European  com 
pleteness.  To  know  our  own  place,  as 
teachers  of  literature — or,  at  our  high 
est,  as  makers  of  it,  or  at  least  as  stimu 
lators  of  others  to  make  it — we  must 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

be  aware  of  all  these  periods  which  have 
gone  before  us.  If  so  may  be,  we  must 
grow  aware  of  them  humanly  enough 
to  make  us  long  to  know  each  and  all 
better  and  better.  So  when,  for  these 
few  coming  moments,  we  here  glance 
at  them,  in  turn,  we  must  not  forget 
that  we  do  so  only  to  remind  ourselves 
of  what  vast  fields  they  offer  for  our 
straying,  even  though  we  never  stray 
anywhere  near  their  extreme  limits. 

When  we  thus  consider  the  literature 
of  antiquity,  we  can  instantly  see  that, 
in  turn,  it  divides  itself  clearly  into  two, 
and  only  two,  distinct  parts :  the  primal 
literature  of  Greece  and  the  imperial 
literature  of  Rome.  There  is  no  need 
to  remind  ourselves  that  each  of  these 
by  itself  has  proved  more  than  enough 
to  occupy  the  whole  scholarly  energy  of 
centuries  of  lifetimes.  To  master  either 
has  long  since  been  a  feat  beyond  the 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

power  of  any  but  special,  laborious,  de 
voted  students.  In  this,  however,  I  see 
no  reason  for  despairing  revulsion  into  a 
mood  where  any  of  us  should  feel  hope 
less  of  acquaintance  with  either.  It  is 
with  each  of  them  as  we  found  the  case 
to  be,  a  little  while  ago,  with  our  own 
beginnings  of  literature  in  America,  or 
with  the  strong,  perennially  vigorous 
literature  of  England.  From  the  num 
berless  writers  who  have  combined  to 
make  any  literature  in  the  complex 
unity  of  its  entirety,  a  few  have  emerged 
eminent;  and  from  the  work  of  these 
few  any  who  will  read  them,  even  in 
the  veiled  disguise  of  enthusiastic  trans 
lation,  may  come  to  know  more  of  the 
spirit  of  the  nations  and  the  epochs 
which  they  express  than  is  always 
vouchsafed  to  your  plodding  scholar, 
burrowing  in  detail  until  he  cares 
mostly  for  technical  exactitude. 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

The  literature  of  Greece,  for  exam 
ple,  I  have  called  primal.  Any  of  you 
who  know  it  at  all,  I  think,  will  have 
some  glimmering  of  the  conception  I 
have  thus  tried  to  summarise  in  a  single 
and  far  from  vivid  word.  It  is  that 
of  the  human  mind,  at  last  fully  awak 
ened  in  the  form  which  we  now  recog 
nise  as  European,  face  to  face  with 
concepts  as  wide  and  as  varied  as  the 
range  of  mortal  intellect  can  know; 
and  troubled  with  no  other  perplexity 
than  must  always  be  involved  in  the  acts 
of  perception  and  of  expression.  The 
Greek,  I  mean,  was  free  to  see  what  he 
could,  and  to  set  it  forth  as  best  he  might, 
untroubled  by  inhibitory  consciousness 
of  excellent  standards  to  which  he  must 
in  scholarly  decency  conform.  With 
all  its  ultimate  maturity  of  expression, 
with  all  its  immense  range  of  human 
perception,  the  literature  of  Greece  has 
[  118  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

in  it  something  of  the  primal  simplicity 
and  dignity  of  childhood. 

One  might  thus  comment  forever ;  it 
is  better  instantly  to  specify  what  I  am 
trying  to  make  clear.  Read  the  first  of 
European  epics,  in  the  poems  of  Homer; 
the  first  ripe  European  lyrics,  in  the 
verses  attributed  to  Anacreon  and  to 
Sappho  and  in  the  Odes  of  Pindar; 
read  dramatic  poetry,  sprung  to  life 
and  almost  supremely  alive,  in  the 
tragedy  of  ^Eschylus,  of  Sophocles, 
and  of  Euripides,  and  in  the  comedy 
of  Aristophanes;  read  history,  unprec 
edented  until  it  stands  forth  mature 
in  the  pages  of  Herodotus,  of  Thucyd- 
ides,  and  of  Xenophon;  in  Xenophon, 
again,  and  in  Plato  read  of  Socrates, 
and  find  philosophy  made  into  litera 
ture;  and  marvel  at  the  cosmic  method 
of  Aristotle,  at  the  final  eloquence  of 
Demosthenes,  and  at  exquisitely  dainty 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

idyls  of  Theocritus.  This  whole  task 
is  not  appalling.  Any  of  us  could  read 
every  line  I  have  touched  on  in  the 
course  of  a  single  summer  vacation. 
Thereby  any  of  us  could  come  to  know, 
and  to  know  in  such  humanity  as  should 
make  him  eager  to  read  on  whenever  he 
could,  not  the  whole  literature  of 
Greece,  but  enough  to  assure  him  for 
ever  of  its  enduringly  primal  splendour. 
Theocritus,  the  last  Greek  I  have 
mentioned,  flourished  some  three  cen 
turies  before  the  Christian  era.  At  that 
moment  there  was  no  other  lasting 
literature  in  all  Europe  than  theirs  of 
Greece ;  and  it  was  nearly  two  hun 
dred  years  later  when  the  literature  of 
European  antiquity  began  to  be  com 
pleted  by  the  lasting  literature  of  Rome. 
Imperial,  I  have  called  it,  for  the  influ 
ence  of  it  remains  potent  even  to  this 
remote  day ;  and  for  one  scholar, 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

through  the  centuries,  who  could  read 
his  Greek  unaided  there  have  been 
thousands  who  could  make  something 
out  of  the  original  pages  of  the  Latin. 
Magnificent  though  Latin  literature  be, 
however,  it  is  in  certain  aspects  second 
ary.  We  need  no  deep  learning  to 
perceive  that  not  a  line  of  its  enduring 
masterpieces  was  penned  by  any  but 
men  saturated  with  Greek  culture,  and 
reverencing  Greek  style  as  the  match 
less  model  of  excellence.  Primality 
can  exist  only  once  ;  nothing  can  revive 
it,  any  more  than  years  can  revive  the 
clear-eyed  purity  of  childhood. 

You  will  feel  what  I  mean  when  I 
hasten  over  the  great  literary  names  of 
Rome,  even  more  summarily  than  I 
have  hastened  over  those  of  Greece. 
Plautus  and  Terence  begin  the  splen 
did  story  with  their  comedies  full  of 
Greek  tradition;  Lucretius  could  not 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

have  made  his  wondrous  didactic 
poem  but  for  the  wondrous  thought 
of  Epicurus;  nor  could  Catullus  have 
made  his  lyrics  without  the  Greek  lyr 
ics  to  guide  him.  What  is  true  of  these 
writers  is  true,  in  other  ways,  of  the 
rest  who  together  make  up  the  tremen 
dous  literature  of  the  Romans — of  Cic 
ero,  and  even  of  Caesar;  of  Virgil,  of 
Horace,  and  of  Ovid;  of  Livy  and  of 
Tacitus;  of  Juvenal  and  of  Martial. 
Together,  just  as  our  Americans  have 
reminded  us  of  America,  our  Englishmen 
of  England,  and  our  Greeks  of  Greece, 
these  thirteen  undying  names  may  re 
mind  us  of  what  the  literature  of  Rome 
was,  and  the  temper  of  Rome,  from  the 
end  of  the  Second  Century  before  Christ 
to  the  beginning  of  the  Second  Century 
of  the  Christian  Era — from  the  final 
days  of  the  Republic  to  the  reign  of  the 
twelfth  of  the  Twelve  Caesars. 
[  122  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

Imperial  and  decadent  at  once  we 
must  find  that  elder  Europe,  in  the  last 
days  of  its  unmixed  antiquity.  To  bring 
forth  the  times  to  come,  it  needed  the 
advent  of  a  spirit  other  than  its  own. 
That  spirit  was  already  at  hand.  It 
was  under  that  same  twelfth  of  the 
Twelve  Caesars,  some  authorities  still  as 
sure  us, — under  that  same  Domitian, — 
that  the  last  survivor  of  the  Twelve 
Apostles  wrote  the  last  book  of  the  New 
Testament.  True  or  not,  in  the  clear 
white  light  of  the  Higher  Criticism,  this 
current  legend  brings  us  straight  to  that 
other  than  European  phase  of  antique 
humanity  which  was  destined  to  surge 
traditionally  forward,  as  the  old  Euro 
pean  empire  of  Rome  resolved  itself  into 
the  separate  nationalities  of  Christen 
dom.  The  books  in  which  these  new 
traditions  are  recorded  have  become  the 
most  familiar  in  the  European  world, 
[  123  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

even  to  the  countless  millions  who  have 
never  opened  these  pages.  In  the  Old 
Testament  is  preserved  the  whole  lit 
erature  of  the  Hebrews,  barbarian  to 
the  Greeks,  and  older,  I  believe,  than 
almost  anything  which  the  Greeks  have 
left  us.  In  the  New  Testament,  this  He 
brew  tradition,  amid  the  tremendous 
agony  of  imperial  Rome,  is  focussed  to 
the  highest  point  of  its  religious  efficacy. 
We  have  no  time  now  to  wander  into 
the  adjacent  fields  of  history.  We  can 
hardly  help  seeing,  the  while,  that  they 
are  close  beside  us — that  to  understand 
literature  a  bit  as  those  who  made 
it  meant  it  we  must  never  forget  the 
circumstances  of  their  earthly  expe 
rience.  So  it  is  not  too  wide  an  ex 
cursion  from  the  literature  which  is 
our  true  concern  together  to  remind 
ourselves  that  during  the  centuries 
when  Barbarians  finally  broke  the  unity 
[  124  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

of  the  Empire,  the  Church  persisted, 
until  one  might  almost  summarise  the 
story  by  asserting  that  the  Twelve 
Caesars  were  supplanted  by  the  Twelve 
Apostles. 

Then  came  the  thousand  years  and 
more  which  the  careless  usage  of  our 
time  is  still  apt  to  summarise  under  the 
intangible  name  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
Literature  they  have  left  us,  various 
and  in  plenty — from  the  solemn  works 
of  the  Fathers  of  the  Church  to  the 
hauntingly  imaginative  beginnings  of 
every  strain  of  modern  letters  which 
has  ensued.  Yet  what  the  Middle  Ages 
have  most  surely  transmitted  to  modern 
times  is  not  so  much  enduring  litera 
ture  as  enduring  tradition — the  stuff 
from  which  enduring  literature  is  made. 
We  can  glance  at  only  a  few  examples 
of  this,  but  these  few  should  suffice  us 
now.  It  is  to  the  Middle  Ages  that  we 
[  125  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

owe  the  traditions  of  the  Church  and 
of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire ;  of  the 
knightly  heroes,  such  as  Charlemagne 
and  Arthur;  of  the  saints,  from  the 
Fathers  themselves,  and  George  with 
his  Dragon,  to  Dominic  and  to  Francis 
of  Assisi.  It  is  to  the  Middle  Ages  that 
we  owe  the  ideals  of  chivalry,  of  hon 
our,  of  courtesy,  and  of  devotion  to 
ideal  womanhood.  It  is  to  them  that 
we  owe  the  whole  range  of  fascinating 
and  inspiring  emotion  which  we  are 
accustomed  to  call  by  the  vague  name 
romantic.  It  was  during  these  same 
ten  centuries  that  nationalities  came 
into  their  modern  being.  It  was  at  the 
close  of  these  centuries  that  all  the  past 
at  which  we  have  been  glancing  to 
gether  was  wondrously  summarised  in 
that  marvellous  poem  of  which  the  sub 
stance  is  the  final  expression  of  medi- 
seval  literature  and  the  style  is  the 
[  126  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

primal  expression  of  modern.     I  mean 
the  Divine  Comedy  of  Dante'. 

Mediaeval  though  the  spirit  be  in 
which  he  would  fix  forever  the  porten 
tous  past,  the  passionate  present,  and 
the  eternal  future,  obedient  to  the 
mystic  love  which  moves  the  sun  and 
the  other  stars,  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  his  great  work,  in  a  modern  vernac 
ular,  is  at  the  same  time  the  first  persis 
tent  monument  of  what  the  subsequent 
literature  of  Europe  was  to  be.  Inevita 
bly  this  literature  has  become  a  matter 
of  numerous  nationalities,  each  with  its 
distinct  and  separate  language.  When 
we  first  approached  the  question  of 
what  European  literature  is — the  litera 
ture  of  which  English  literature,  and  ours 
of  America,  is  only  a  part — we  named 
its  five  chief  phases  :  the  Italian,  the 
French,  the  Spanish,  the  German,  and 
our  English  itself.  At  no  one  time 
[  127  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

throughout  their  six  centuries  of  con 
temporaneous  development  have  they 
all  flourished  equally.  At  different 
periods  each  has  been  stirred,  in  vari 
ous  ways,  by  forces  seemingly  peculiar 
to  itself.  We  need  no  great  keenness  of 
vision,  however,  to  perceive  that,  on 
the  whole,  the  greater  of  these  forces, 
however  distorted  in  momentary  aspects, 
have  really  been  vitally  common  to 
them  all.  We  have  no  time  left  us  now 
to  linger  even  over  such  magnificently 
memorable  details  as  the  chief  names  of 
European  literature,  apart  from  Eng 
lish,  during  the  past  six  hundred  years. 
We  can  only  recall  a  very  few  of  the 
most  significant :  Petrarch,  for  example, 
and  Boccaccio;  Ariosto  and  Machia- 
velli;  Luther,  Tasso,  Cervantes,  Rabe 
lais,  and  Montaigne ;  Corneille,  Moliere, 
and  Racine;  Voltaire  and  Rousseau; 
Goethe  and  Schiller.  All  we  can  hope 
[  128  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

to  do  more,  here  and  now,  is  to  recog 
nise  how  profoundly  literature  and 
history  are  fused,  and  thus  attempt  to 
perceive  some  broadest  traits  of  the  six 
centuries  throughout  which  Europe  has 
incessantly  expressed  itself  from  the 
days  of  Dante  to  these  times  in  which 
we  ourselves  live. 

The  broadest  trait  of  all,  I  believe,  is 
clear  throughout  them  from  beginning  to 
end.  From  the  Fourteenth  Century  to 
this  Twentieth,  of  which  no  one  now  liv 
ing  may  ever  know  the  full  course,  the 
mind  of  Europe  has  been  rebellious 
against  the  authority  of  tradition;  it  has 
sought  to  be  reasonable — to  know  rather 
than  to  believe.  This  dominant  spirit 
may,  perhaps,  be  summarised  as  the  crit 
ical  ;  there  has  everywhere  been  a  con 
stant  eagerness  to  see  things  as  they 
really  are.  In  the  Fourteenth  Century 
and  the  Fifteenth,  this  spirit  showed 
[  129  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

itself  most  characteristically  in  relation 
to  the  facts  of  civilised  antiquity — of  art 
and  of  culture.  What  resulted  was  that 
revival  of  antique  ideals  to  which  we 
give  the  name  of  Renaissance.  In  the 
Sixteenth  Century,  the  critical  spirit  was 
applied  most  signally  to  matters  not  of 
historical  and  artistic  tradition  but  of 
religious ;  and  we  should  not  summarise 
that  century  ill  if  we  called  it  once  for  all 
the  century  of  the  Reformation.  In  the 
Seventeenth  Century  and  the  Eigh 
teenth,  the  most  ardent  activities  of  the 
critical  spirit  were  exhibited  in  matters 
of  politics  and  of  government ;  wherefore 
these  centuries  culminated  in  the  still 
portentous  fact  of  Revolution.  During 
the  Nineteenth  Century,  with  its  mar 
vellously  increased  mastery  of  science, 
the  critical  spirit  has  been  engaged  most 
alertly  and  most  passionately  with  the 
temporal  welfare  of  human  beings ;  you 
[  130  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

and  I  were  born,  and  shall  die,  in  a  period 
of  which  the  dominant  passion  is  for  Re 
form.  Again,  it  may  seem  to  you  that 
I  have  strayed  from  literature.  Yet  it 
is  from  the  study  of  literature  that  I 
have  been  impelled  to  make  these  huge 
generalisations.  Reflect,  if  you  ever 
care  to,  on  the  names  of  the  masters 
whom  we  have  recalled  together,  from 
Francis  Petrarch  to  Thomas  Carlyle. 
You  will  marvel,  I  believe,  at  the  pre 
cision  with  which  you  will  find  them  to 
define  these  consecutive  phases  of  the 
time  spirit,  working  its  way,  for  good 
or  for  ill,  irresistibly. 

Further  than  this  we  cannot  go  to 
gether  now.  All  that  is  left  me  is  to  re 
peat,  if  I  can,  some  summary  of  the 
message  which,  as  a  teacher,  I  have 
striven  to  bring  to  you  who  teach.  Our 
daily  work,  we  should  all  agree,  must 
mostly  seem  humble  and  dreary.  Yet 
[  131  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

even  though  our  study  of  literature, 
which  we  have  taken  as  an  example  of 
any  range  of  study  whatsoever,  seem 
at  first  abortive,  it  can  lead  us,  we  have 
seen,  to  ranges  of  thought  where  centu 
ries  have  not  yet  sufficed  humanity  to 
attain  the  lofty  level  of  certainty.  They 
have  thus  led  us  to  regions  where  you 
and  I,  as  eager  students,  may  forever 
mount  upward,  and  where,  so  mount 
ing,  we  may  forever  lead  the  students 
who  shall  follow  us.  If  your  work 
and  mine,  as  students  and  as  teachers, 
be  faithfully  done,  it  cannot  fail  to 
help  the  students  of  the  future,  just 
as  our  own  work  has  been  helped 
by  the  work  of  the  students  of  the  past. 
A  trite  message,  after  all,  this  may 
seem;  yet  the  very  fact  of  its  triteness 
goes  far  to  prove  both  the  truth  of  it 
and  the  need.  If  any  of  you  have  felt 
it  needful  and  truthful,  it  has  been 
[  132  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  LITERATURE 

worth  while.  Surely,  too,  there  could 
have  been  no  happier  moment  for  such 
a  message  than  that  which  has  here 
brought  us  together.  What  one  faithful 
teacher  has  done  for  us  who  follow  her 
is  attested  by  the  establishment  of  this 
lectureship  in  her  memory,  sustaining 
the  work  of  her  spirit  long  after  her 
daily  work  has  come  to  its  peaceful  end. 


[    133   ] 


IV 
THE    STUDY    OF    EXPRESSION 

A    Commencement    Address    at    the    College   of 
Charleston,    South  Carolina,    15  June,  1909. 

First  printed  in   the  Charleston   "Sunday  News," 
20  June,  1909. 


IV 
THE    STUDY    OF    EXPRESSION 

MR.  PRESIDENT,  AND  GENTLEMEN  OF 
THE  COLLEGE  OF   CHARLESTON: 

The  honour  you  have  done  me  comes 
with  all  the  grace  of  unexpected  re 
newal.  Once  before  you  were  so  kind 
as  to  invite  me  to  take  part  in  an  occa 
sion  like  this.  No  invitation  was  ever 
more  welcome.  All  my  life  I  had 
eagerly  wished  to  know  something  of  the 
South — not  as  a  student,  or  a  traveller, 
but  as  a  human  being,  mingling  for  a 
little  while  with  Southern  fellow-coun 
trymen  in  their  habit  as  they  live.  There 
could  have  been  no  happier  opportu 
nity  to  do  so  than  your  invitation 
[  137  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

brought  me — few  keener  regrets  than 
that  with  which  I  found  myself  com 
pelled  to  leave  long  hope  unfulfilled. 
That  you  should  have  cared  to  sum 
mon  me  again,  and  at  a  moment  when 
I  could  respond  to  the  summons,  there 
fore  means  that  what  had  seemed  fatally 
lost  is  restored  with  a  glow  of  hospi 
table  reiteration  never  to  be  forgotten. 
Nor  is  this  all.  In  calling  me  from 
Harvard  College  to  address  men  who 
have  loyally  pursued  their  studies  in 
the  College  of  Charleston,  you  have 
done  something  more  than  a  friendly 
act  from  men  to  man,  from  colleagues 
to  colleague,  or  from  institution  to  in 
stitution;  you  have  happily  urged  that 
for  a  little  while,  at  a  moment  such  as 
often  lingers  long  in  the  memory  of 
those  in  whose  lives  it  marks  an  epoch, 
Massachusetts  should  speak  to  South 
Carolina,  Boston  to  Charleston.  There 
[  138  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

could  be  no  more  hearty  message  of 
peace  and  goodwill. 

Yet  if  you  have  supposed  that  I 
could  speak  to  you  in  any  official  char 
acter,  I  can  hardly  fulfil  your  expecta 
tions.  Throughout  the  career  of  the 
eminent  man  who  has  just  withdrawn 
from  the  presidency  of  Harvard  Col 
lege,  he  has  maintained  there  a  remark 
able  degree  of  personal  liberty.  One 
and  all  of  us  have  been  free  as  air  to  say 
everywhere  whatever  seemed  to  us  true 
or  wise.  With  that  privilege  the  very 
purity  of  our  liberty  has  brought  our 
authority  to  an  end.  None  of  us  can 
pretend,  any  more  than  President  Eliot 
has  pretended,  to  speak  for  others. 
Whatever  a  Harvard  man  utters — ex 
cept  at  the  rare  moments  when  he  is 
charged  with  a  formal  academic  mis 
sion,  and  therefore  is  told  just  what  to 
say — must  be  taken  as  coming  only 
[  139  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

from  him,  and  in  no  wise  implicating 
even  his  nearest  colleagues — far  less  the 
College, or  the  University, which  we  serve 
in  common.  What  is  more,  our  deepest 
community,  at  that  immemorial  nurs 
ery  of  traditional  and  extreme  Protest 
antism,  lies  in  tolerated  divergence  of 
opinion.  No  two  of  us  think  quite  alike. 
We  live  together  somehow,  Radical 
and  Conservative,  Tory  and  Revolu 
tionary,  heretic  and  orthodox,  at  one 
only  in  faith  that  the  truth  shall  prevail. 
At  a  time  like  this,  accordingly,  I  can 
bring  you  no  message  but  my  own.  It 
is  implicitly  from  the  North,  no  doubt, 
for  the  reason  that  I  have  always  lived 
there,  seeing  things  from  the  angle 
whence  Northerners  of  the  past  fifty 
years  must  perforce  have  observed  the 
mysteries  of  time  and  space  and  eter 
nity.  It  is  implicitly  from  Massachu 
setts,  because  I  was  born  there,  and 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

have  lived  there  most  of  my  life.  It  is 
implicitly  from  Harvard  where  I  not 
only  took  my  degree,  but  where  I  have 
been  a  teacher  since  I  was  less  than 
half  my  present  age.  I  cannot  speak 
to  you,  however,  for  Harvard  or  for 
Massachusetts,  or  for  the  North.  I 
can  speak  only  for  myself,  man  to  man. 
I  come,  in  fine,  as  one  whose  mature 
years  have  been  wholly  passed  amid 
American  academic  surroundings,  to 
say  what  best  I  can  at  a  moment  when 
a  little  company  of  others  are  just 
emerging  from  such  academic  sur 
roundings  to  confront  hereafter,  I  sup 
pose, — at  least  in  most  cases, — other  and 
widely  different  conditions. 

At  such  a  moment  one  inevitably 
stops  to  think;  and  when  one  stops  to 
think  nowadays,  one  almost  inevitably 
falls  to  asking  oneself  troublous  ques 
tions.  Cui  bono?  is  among  the  most  in- 
[  Hi  1 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

sistently  recurrent  of  them.  We  college 
men  differ  from  the  unnumbered  ma 
jority  of  our  fellow-citizens  in  that  be 
tween  the  common  routine  of  school 
training  and  the  arduous  reality  of  in 
exorable  fact  we  have  paused,  through 
four  years  of  something  no  longer  youth 
and  not  yet  manhood,  to  gather  strength, 
memories,  traditions,  which  shall  help 
us  through  the  years  to  come.  How  has 
this  college  interval  helped  us,  after  all  ? 
not  a  few  of  us  must  ask;  what  is  the 
use  of  it?  to  whom  has  it  done  what 
manner  of  good  ? 

Unless  your  experience  hereabouts 
be  widely  different  from  any  which  has 
gladdened  the  region  I  come  from — 
different,  as  well,  from  that  of  the  stu 
dents  who  year  after  year  have  made 
their  way  from  the  South,  and  from  the 
West,  and  from  elsewhere  to  pursue 
graduate  studies  at  Harvard — a  dis- 
[  142  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

concerting  fact  must  be  acknowledged 
once  for  all.  Men  who  have  never  been 
at  college  imagine  that  our  college  years 
have  taught  us  something  positive — 
how  to  read  foreign  languages,  for  ex 
ample,  how  to  appreciate  literature  and 
fine  art,  or  how  to  practise  with  skill 
certain  of  the  arts  not  called  fine,  how 
to  apply  science  or  to  conduct  affairs. 
They  assume  that  an  academic  degree 
stamps  us  as  somehow  expert.  We 
graduates  of  colleges  have  the  sad  mis 
fortune  to  know  better.  Few  of  us,  for 
example,  who  have  studied  French  or 
German  for  years,  can  pretend  to  use 
a  text-book  in  either  language — far  less 
turn  to  the  literature  of  either,  as  a 
matter  of  pleasure.  Hardly  one  of  us 
unaided  by  translation,  I  venture  to 
guess,  can  make  much  sense  out  of  a 
page  of  Latin  or  of  Greek.  Very  few 
could  tell  you,  off-hand,  the  century  in 
[  143  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

which  Herodotus  wrote  or  Cicero,  could 
distinguish  between  St.  Gregory  and 
Hildebrand,  could  give  a  clear  account 
of  Lady  Jane  Grey,  could  name  the 
Presidents  of  the  United  States,  could 
explain  why  no  one  who  understands 
Elizabethan  literature  has  ever  sup 
posed  that  the  author  of  Bacon's  Essays 
wrote  "Hamlet"  and  the  "Tempest," 
or  could  expound  the  principles  of 
Descartes,  of  Locke,  or  of  John 
Stuart  Mill.  Very  few,  either,  could  be 
trusted  to  make  an  accurate  survey  of 
land;  to  identify  a  mineral,  a  shrub,  or 
a  bone;  to  understand  the  published 
statement  of  a  bank;  or  even  to  help 
a  little  brother  through  the  perplexities 
of  a  new  algebraic  problem  or  geomet 
rical  proposition.  Far  from  becoming 
expert  anywhere  during  our  college 
years,  we  are  more  likely  to  have  lost 
what  little  pretension  to  expert  knowl- 
[  144  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

edge  or  power  we  may  have  possessed 
at  school. 

Even  though  we  find  ourselves,  how 
ever,  thus  desperately  remote  from 
what  other  people  expect  us  to  be,  we 
shall  hardly  differ  among  ourselves  in 
gladness  that  we  have  had  this  pleasant 
interval  between  schooldays  and  life. 
Our  gladness,  too,  will  not  be  all  be 
cause  of  the  gently  human  phases  of 
our  college  years — the  friendships  and 
the  memories  deep-rooted  in  our  hearts. 
We  shall  be  glad  as  well  of  something 
less  palpable,  less  definite,  yet  hardly 
less  certain.  After  all,  common  sense 
is  rarely  wrong,  except  when  it  makes 
the  mistake  of  trying  rationally  to  ac 
count  for  what  it  recognises.  College, 
as  common  sense  assures  our  whole 
country,  is  really  worth  while.  Even 
though  four  years  of  college  fail  in 
general  to  make  college  men  expert, 
[  145  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

they  manage  somehow  to  stimulate  or, 
at  worst,  not  to  repress  what  powers 
of  leadership  those  fortunate  human 
beings  may  have  been  born  with.  I  do 
not  mean  that  your  leaders  of  public 
opinion,  great  or  small,  need  academic 
degrees  or  experience,  nor  that  your 
college  man  will  not  everywhere  find 
others  than  college  men  to  measure 
himself  with,  abundantly  worth  all  the 
mettle  that  is  in  him.  But  the  fact  re 
mains,  and  we  all  believe  it  sure  to 
remain  through  generations  to  come, 
that  when  you  call  the  roll  of  your 
classmates,  ten,  twenty,  or  fifty  years 
after  a  commencement  day  like  this, 
you  will  find  surprisingly  few  of  them, 
when  you  compare  them  with  groups 
of  men  collected  otherwise,  who  have 
failed  to  sustain  themselves  to  the 
best  of  their  powers.  To  use  a  cant 
expression  of  the  moment,  your  col- 
[  146  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

lege  man  is  more  than  likely  to  make 
good. 

Partly,  beyond  question,  this  is  a 
matter  of  the  still  strenuous  process  of 
selection  by  which  he  has  emerged  from 
the  mass  of  his  schoolfellows  and  con 
temporaries.  By  no  means  everybody 
can  sustain  the  initiatory  test  of  en 
trance  examinations  or  the  recurrent 
scrutinies  of  any  college  course,  how 
ever  far  from  ideal  in  plan  or  in  result. 
Partly,  however,  and  to  my  mind  far 
more  profoundly,  it  seems  due  to  a 
truth  which  all  the  disintegrating  ten 
dencies  of  modern  education  have  as 
yet  proved  powerless  to  deny.  Learn 
ing,  to  be  sure,  has  been  divided  and 
subdivided,  specialised  and  subspecial- 
ised,  until  a  modern  college  catalogue, 
with  its  bewildering  announcement  of 
courses  and  instructors,  reminds  one 
of  nothing  so  much  as  of  those  intri- 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

cately  dissected  pictures,  innocent  of 
guiding  plan,  which  have  lately  proved 
alluring  toys  to  grown-up  children  as 
well  as  to  children  pure  and  simple. 
Now  learning,  we  should  all  agree,  is 
not  a  toy;  its  analogy  to  these  play 
things,  nevertheless,  is  mo're  than  super 
ficial.  What  makes  the  pictures  fas 
cinating,  tantalising  if  you  will,  is  your 
certainty  that  each  fragment,  grotesque 
or  rebellious  though  it  may  seem, 
really  has  its  place  in  a  scheme  capable 
of  reduction  by  intelligence  to  organ 
ised  unity.  Something  similar  is  true 
of  what  we  study,  and  more  or  less 
learn,  at  college.  Each  separate  bit  of 
it  is  presented  to  us  single,  distinct, 
apart;  yet  each,  we  dumbly  know,  has 
its  final  relation  to  every  other.  Alone,  or 
in  company,  or  with  guidance,  we  must 
busy  ourselves  to  put  the  pieces  together, 
if  they  are  ever  to  have  much  meaning. 

[    1*8   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

Guidance,  no  doubt,  is  apt  nowa 
days  to  be  rather  blind.  Our  guides 
often  seem  more  interested  in  contem 
plating  the  outlines  of  their  fragments 
than  in  trying  to  discover  which  will  fit 
into  which.  None  the  less,  I  believe, 
your  college  man — and  your  college 
man,  I  mean,  as  distinguished  not  only 
from  untrained  men,  but  also  from  men 
whose  training  has  been  confined  to 
technical  schools — will  rarely  rest  con 
tent  until  he  can  begin  to  discern  what 
belongs  where.  Even  though  our  teach 
ing  apparently  strive  to  satisfy  us  with 
the  ideal  of  perceiving  things  apart,  it 
is  powerless  to  prevent  our  impulse — 
and  indeed,  purposely  or  not,  it  often 
serves  rather  to  stimulate  our  impulse 
— toward  thinking  things  together. 

If  superlatives  were  not  treacherous, 
I  should  be  disposed  to  assert  this  power 
of  thinking  together  things  which  other 
[  149  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

men  can  only  perceive  apart  the  chief 
good,  the  chief  end  and  aim,  the  chief 
justification  of  a  college  career,  for  all 
men  not  destined  to  accept  such  a  ca 
reer  as  professional.  As  an  example  of 
what  I  have  in  mind,  we  may  turn  to 
two  fields  of  study  usually  presented 
nowadays  as  distinct — the  fields  of  his 
tory  and  literature.  Commonly,  as  we 
all  know,  they  are  taught  and  studied 
apart;  and  indeed,  in  certain  aspects, 
they  may  perhaps  be  so  studied  most 
profitably.  Otherwise,  to  go  no  further, 
there  would  be  no  reason  for  the  exist 
ence  of  two  admirable  societies,  which 
I  respected  equally  until  one  of  them 
abandoned  itself  to  the  excesses  of  re 
formed  spelling — the  American  Histor 
ical  Association  and  the  Modern  Lan 
guage  Association  of  America.  In  point 
of  fact,  however,  everybody  is  aware 
that  literature  can  never  be  completely 
[  150  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

independent  of  historical  conditions. 
Everything  ever  written,  we  must  surely 
agree,  was  written  at  some  definite  time 
and  in  some  definite  place.  History, 
we  thus  come  to  see,  is  the  ultimate 
basis  of  all  literature;  just  as  all  lit 
erature  might  be  described  as  the 
voice  of  history. 

Once  begin  thus  to  think  of  them  to 
gether,  and  you  will  find  it  hard  to  think 
them  apart.  Remember,  for  example, 
that  Marlowe's  "  Tamburlaine  "  belongs 
to  the  period  of  the  Spanish  Armada; 
that  Wordsworth  and  Shelley  and  Byron 
felt  the  spiritual  upheaval  of  the  French 
Revolution ;  that  the  novels  of  Dickens 
came  just  after  the  Reform  Bill;  that 
Sidney  Lanier  was  a  devotedly  loyal 
Confederate  soldier.  You  will  soon 
come  to  feel  that  these  lasting  poets  and 
story-tellers  could  never  have  been  what 
they  were  but  for  the  tremendous  his- 
[  151  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

torical  forces  which  surged  about  them. 
Try  next  to  think  of  those  forces  as 
voiceless:  and  you  will  find  them  in 
stantly  begin  to  lose  something  of  the 
vitality  which  now  makes  them  undy 
ing.  Or  trace  in  imagination  the  career 
of  Milton,  until  you  can  feel  how  the 
passionate  aspiration  of  the  English 
Puritans,  dreaming  that  they  could 
remould  a  nation  in  obedience  to 
what  they  fervently  believed  the  will 
of  a  Calvinistic  God,  exhausted  itself 
through  generations  of  mystical  ecstasy 
and  grim  work,  until  only  in  his  blind 
awakening  to  frustration  of  earthly 
hope  the  one  great  Puritan  poet  could 
finally  breathe  out  the  deathless  lines 
of  "  Paradise  Lost."  History  and  lit 
erature,  we  grow  to  see,  may  be  known 
apart,  minutely  as  you  will;  they  can 
not  be  understood,  and  neither  can  be 
gin  to  approach  the  full  significance  of 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

their  mutual  meaning,  until  we  come  to 
know  them  and  to  think  of  them  inex 
tricably  and  eternally  together. 

Now,  though  no  one  would  pretend 
that  modern  college  men,  as  a  class, 
are  thus  given  to  thinking  history  and 
literature  together,  there  can  be  little 
doubt  that  college  men  are  better  able 
to  do  so,  are  more  disposed  to  do  so, 
and — if  we  take  them  by  and  large — 
are  more  likely  to  do  so  than  men  who 
have  never  had  college  training.  His 
tory  and  literature,  too,  we  have  consid 
ered  only  as  a  single  illustrative  example 
of  a  general  truth.  Almost  any  other 
fields  of  learning  might  have  served  our 
purpose  quite  as  well.  What  we  now 
call  the  principles  of  evolution,  for  in 
stance,  first  evident  in  such  natural 
sciences  as  astronomy  or  biology,  prove 
illuminating  in  economics,  in  literature, 
in  the  fine  arts — throughout  the  whole 
[  153  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

baffling  course  of  earthly  progress  from 
birth  to  death.  Think  of  things  to 
gether  and  you  will  presently  find  each 
to  signify  more  than  it  could  ever  sig 
nify  alone.  Words  themselves,  the  sym 
bols  of  our  thoughts,  often  seem,  when 
we  take  them  one  by  one,  almost  as 
meaningless  as  the  letters  which  com 
pose  them  for  the  eye.  Put  a  few  of  them 
side  by  side,  however,  even  as  we  are  put 
ting  some  together  at  this  moment,  and 
you  will  feel  beyond  dispute  the  magic 
power  of  composition. 

The  good  old  days  when  college 
training  was  still  based  on  Latin — the 
true  universal  language  of  European 
history  and  tradition — are  not  yet  so 
far  past  but  that  we  may  all  remember 
what  that  familiar  word  literally  means. 
It  signifies  exactly  what  we  have  been 
trying  to  define  in  our  minds — the 
process  of  putting  together.  If  we  thus 
[  154  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

agree  to  use  it,  for  the  moment,  in  its 
original  sense,  we  may  perhaps  describe 
the  most  stimulating  and  the  most  en 
during  result  of  our  college  days  as  a 
strengthened  power  of  composition. 
Your  educated  man  has  an  inclination 
which  may  well  grow  into  a  yearning, 
even  into  a  passion,  for  putting  things, 
wherever  he  may  find  them,  in  the  places 
where  they  best  belong.  To  greater 
or  less  degree,  he  thereby  becomes  a 
composer  of  a  philosophy.  Your  best 
philosophers,  too,  your  wisest  men,  are 
those  who  compose  at  once  most  vigor 
ously  and  most  truly — with  the  least 
eccentricity  and  the  most  courage.  The 
ideal  end  of  such  years  as  make  up  our 
college  lives  may  be  stated,  indeed, 
as  mastery  of  composition. 

Already  you  may  perhaps  feel   that 
I  am  playing  on  the  word.     Whatever 
composition   may   literally   mean,   you 
[   155   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

might  remind  me,  we  use  the  word 
nowadays  in  a  sense  so  definite  that 
whoever  attempts  to  use  it  otherwise 
comes  near  distortion  of  language. 
When  any  of  us  accustomed  to  Ameri 
can  schools  or  colleges  during  the  last 
generation  hear  the  word  composition, 
it  must  first  of  all  suggest  a  specific  fact 
— namely,  certain  formal  and  by  no 
means  always  fruitful  courses  of  study, 
which  more  or  less  willingly  we  have 
been  compelled  to  pursue.  Beyond  per- 
adventure  it  now  associates  itself  prin 
cipally  with  the  ideas  of  words,  of  sen 
tences,  of  paragraphs  and  the  like — or,  to 
use  a  cant  phrase  from  the  text-books, 
with  the  expression  of  thought  and  emo 
tion  in  written  words.  This  limitation 
of  its  meaning,  too,  is  not  the  whole 
story.  We  are  used  to  hearing  of  Latin 
composition,  to  be  sure,  of  Greek  com 
position,  of  French  and  German,  Italian 
[  156  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

and  Spanish;  you  will  find  them  all  in 
any  considerable  announcement  of  col 
lege  studies  throughout  America.  By 
itself,  however,  the  word  composition 
suggests  no  foreign  language  whatso 
ever.  The  very  fact  that  we  speak  of 
French  composition,  or  of  German,  or 
of  Italian,  as  a  thing  apart  implies  that 
each  of  them  is  different  in  our  minds 
from  all  the  others — individual,  sepa 
rate,  distinct.  By  itself,  the  word  com 
position  unquestionably  suggests  to 
most  of  us  the  expression  of  thought 
and  feeling  in  the  written  words  of  our 
own  native  language. 

For  our  present  purposes  this  acci 
dent  is  not  unhappy.  Quite  to  under 
stand  any  such  generalisations  as  we  are 
now  attempting,  nothing  can  help  us 
more  than  to  scrutinise  some  specific 
example  of  what  we  have  in  mind. 
Here  is  one  at  hand.  What  is  true  of 
[  157  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

composition  in  the  broadest  philosoph 
ical  sense — where  it  is  concerned  with 
thinking  together  the  universe,  from 
the  systems  of  astronomy  to  the  mole 
cules  of  physics — is  true,  in  principle, 
of  composition,  when  applied  to  articu 
late  expression  in  words  alone. 

In  this  aspect  it  has  the  momentary 
advantage  of  familiarity;  for  at  least 
throughout  the  life-time  of  any  man 
now  or  lately,  in  an  American  college, 
it  has  thus  been  devotedly  studied  from 
the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific.  There  are 
various  reasons,  accordingly,  why  we 
may  do  well,  during  our  little  while 
here  together,  to  dwell  on  it  as  an  ex 
ample  of  what  college  training  can  do 
for  us  nowadays.  Insomuch,  further 
more,  as  this  kind  of  illustration  cannot 
be  too  specific,  I  shall  ask  no  pardon  for 
touching  on  it  as  it  has  come  within  my 
own  observation  at  Harvard  College. 
[  158  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

I  shall  only  ask  you  to  remember  what 
I  said  a  little  while  ago — that  I  am  by 
no  means  authorised  to  speak  in  the 
name  of  Harvard,  where  opinions 
sometimes  seem  as  numerous  as  pro 
fessors  ;  nor  even  in  the  slightest  degree 
to  implicate  any  of  my  immediate  col 
leagues,  who  are  apt  cordially  to  dis 
agree  not  only  with  me,  but  with  each 
other.  What  I  say  sets  forth  merely 
what  one  teacher  has  come  to  think  and 
to  believe  concerning  the  study  of  liter 
ary  expression — the  phase  in  which  the 
study  of  composition  has  chanced  to 
come  chiefly  within  his  experience. 

That  experience  is  now  considerable. 
Long  before  my  time  it  was  generally 
felt  that  Harvard  men  used  their  native 
language  with  little  skill.  The  great 
and  vital  growth  of  Harvard  during  the 
forty  years  of  President  Eliot's  admin 
istration  has  been  bound  up  with  his 
[  159  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

belief  that  whoever  does  anything  ill 
can  be  taught,  and  therefore  ought  to 
be  taught,  to  do  it  well,  or  at  least  bet 
ter.  By  the  time  when  I  was  old  enough 
to  undertake  responsible  work,  accord 
ingly,  the  state  of  affairs  at  Harvard 
was  peculiarly  favourable  to  the  study 
of  literary  composition,  on  the  part  of 
teachers  and  pupils  alike.  The  need 
of  it  was  acknowledged;  the  pursuit 
of  it  was  encouraged;  and  the  author 
ities  gave  us  every  aid  in  their  power. 
Thus  a  little  company  of  us  attacked 
our  task,  just  as  more  and  more  of  us 
have  attacked  it  ever  since;  and  statis 
tically,  so  far  as  anybody  could  infer 
from  the  President's  Reports,  we  have 
been  pretty  successful.  Years  ago  the 
number  of  students  who  had  submitted 
to  our  teaching  began  to  be  counted  not 
by  the  hundred  but  by  the  thousand. 
Such  an  experience  must  stimulate  any 
[  160  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

teacher  to  do  his  best  in  every  way. 
We  have  all  tried  to. 

Now  it  happened  that  about  1890, 
one  of  my  personal  efforts  to  do  my  best 
under  these  circumstances  resulted  in  an 
attempt  to  generalise  more  clearly  and 
systematically  than  others  had  done  the 
principles  of  the  art  which  I  was  attempt 
ing  to  teach.  My  consequent  book,  enti 
tled  "English  Composition,"  embodied 
the  results  of  ten  years'  experiment  and 
thought.  It  was  not  particularly  orig 
inal,  except  that  perhaps  it  collected 
and  stated  common  material  more  in 
telligibly  and  rather  more  readably 
than  was  then  usual.  It  set  forth  that 
the  qualities  of  a  good  style  are  Clear 
ness,  Force,  and  Elegance;  or,  in  other 
words,  that  whoever  writes  well  ought 
to  write  so  that  you  can  understand 
him,  so  that  he  will  not  bore  you,  and 
so  that  he  will  please  you.  It  set  forth 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

that  literary  composition — that  is,  the 
putting  together  of  words  in  sentences, 
or  of  sentences  in  paragraphs,  or  of 
paragraphs  in  chapters,  and  so  on — 
may  be  guided  toward  the  qualities 
which  it  ought  to  exemplify  by  more  or 
less  conscious  and  habitual  observance 
of  three  cardinal  principles,  to  which  I 
gave  the  names  of  Unity,  of  Mass  or 
Emphasis,  and  of  Coherence.  To  con 
tinue  the  summary  would  be  tedious. 
If  the  matter  interest  you  the  book  sur 
vives;  if  the  matter  leave  you  indiffer 
ent,  you  may  rest  content  that  no  hu 
man  being  would  ever  dream  of  count 
ing  this  little  volume  among  the  books 
which  everybody  ought  to  know.  The 
surprising  five-foot  shelf  of  President 
Eliot  might  grow  a  hundred  times  as 
long  without  finding  room  for  it. 

You  may  well  wonder,  accordingly, 
why  I  have  had  the  temerity  to  trouble 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

you  with  it  at  all.  My  reason  is  that  in 
my  own  experience,  which  is  for  the  mo 
ment  what  I  am  trying  to  make  clear, 
this  not  very  important  book  has  proved 
a  landmark.  It  defines,  as  nothing  less 
definite  could  define,  a  moment  when,  at 
least  to  me,  the  matter  with  which  it 
deals  looked  doubly  hopeful,  in  ways 
which  the  intervening  nineteen  years 
have  disappointed.  It  expresses  a  state 
of  gradually  growing  scholarship  when 
one  stops  to  generalise  mostly  for  the 
sake  of  getting  one's  ideas  in  order,  so 
that  thereafter  one  may  go  on  to  gen 
eralise,  and  to  learn,  more  and  more; 
and  it  implies,  from  beginning  to  end, 
unshaken  faith  in  the  all-sufficient  effi 
cacy  of  its  doctrine.  To  put  the  matter 
more  simply,  it  indicates  hardly  any 
doubt  that  if  Harvard  teachers  should 
bravely  proceed  wTith  the  work  they  had 
begun,  Harvard  students  would  end  by 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

writing  a  great  deal  better  than  they 
have  ever  written  yet. 

The  book  appeared  nineteen  years 
ago.  If  you  will  pardon  my  compla 
cency  in  saying  so,  it  has  stood  the  test 
of  time.  At  this  moment,  I  mean,  so 
long  after  it  was  written,  it  seems  to  me 
as  true  as  it  seemed  to  begin  with ;  and 
even  my  now  ripened  experience  could 
make  nothing  much  more  useful  for  any 
who  should  desire  my  counsel  about  the 
matter  it  deals  with.  It  disappoints  me 
not  for  any  positive  reason;  but  only 
because  nineteen  laborious  years  have 
taught  me  so  little  more  of  the  subject. 
In  a  general  way,  meanwhile,  I  have 
tried  to  keep  aware  of  what  other  peo 
ple  have  had  to  say  about  this  matter 
of  literary  composition.  The  fact  that 
I  have  come  across  nothing  seriously 
to  modify  my  views,  or  to  alter  my  ex 
pression  of  them,  except  in  verbal  de- 
[  164  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

tail,  seems  to  me  significant.  Twenty 
years  ago,  composition,  studied  by  it 
self,  appeared  full  of  unforeseen  possi 
bilities;  now,  as  a  subject  of  study,  it 
has  come  to  seem  exhaustible  by  a  single 
and  not  very  arduous  effort.  The  only 
new  idea  I  have  lately  had  about  it  is 
at  once  slight  and  on  the  whole  unwel 
come  to  my  colleagues.  In  brief,  as  a 
teacher,  I  have  come  to  think  that  hon 
est  students  are  likely  nowadays  to 
blunder  into  more  study  of  literary 
composition  than  is  good  for  them. 
I  am  accordingly  disposed  to  advise,  as 
a  matter  of  general  economy,  that,  in  a 
given  college  year,  no  student  should 
be  allowed  to  count  toward  any  degree 
more  than  one  course  of  instruction  in 
composition,  no  matter  what  language 
such  a  course  be  concerned  with.  The 
true  principles  of  composition,  as  I 
apprehend  them,  apply  equally  to  every 
[  1C5  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

language  ever  devised  by  man;  the 
differences  in  this  aspect,  between  an 
cient  languages  and  modern,  and  the 
differences  of  any  languages — ancient  or 
modern — among  themselves,  are  mere 
accidents  of  idiom.  So  far  as  compo 
sition  goes,  what  you  learn  in  one  you 
may  apply  in  all  or  any.  My  colleagues, 
however,  seem  unanimously  disposed  to 
hold  this  opinion  mistaken. 

Taken  by  itself  such  reminiscence  as 
I  have  indulged  in  may  well  appear  triv 
ially  anecdotic.  Taken  in  its  relation  to 
what  we  have  had  in  mind  before,  how 
ever,  it  has,  I  think,  a  fairly  definite  sig 
nificance — namely,  that  the  principles  of 
composition,  at  least  when  concerned 
with  matters  of  literary  expression,  can 
not  long  be  studied  fruitfully  by  them 
selves.  The  reason  why  is  at  once  not 
far  to  seek,  and  on  the  whole  illumi 
nating  ;  for  you  will  find  it  applicable 
[  166  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

to  the  process  of  composition  in  every 
imaginable  phase.  The  very  word 
composition,  indeed,  implies  this  rea 
son  why,  studied  by  itself,  the  subject 
turns  out  to  be  sterile.  When  we 
study  anything  whatever  by  itself,  we 
necessarily  isolate  it  from  everything 
else;  in  attending  exclusively  to  com 
position,  accordingly,  we  begin  un 
wittingly  to  lose  the  habit,  if  we  ever 
had  one,  of  thinking  it  into  relation 
with  other  matters.  To  put  the  case 
otherwise,  paradoxically  but  almost 
exactly,  over-concentrated  attention  to 
composition  cannot  help  resulting  in 
something  like  paralysis  of  power  to 
compose.  For  if  you  have  only  one 
thing  to  put  somewhere,  you  have  noth 
ing  to  put  it  together  with. 

All  this  might  not  have  been  fatally 
disappointing,  the  nineteen-year  while, 
if  the  result  of  our  efforts  to  teach  lit- 
[    167   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

erary  composition  at  Harvard,  however 
fraught  with  limitation  for  ourselves, 
had  resulted  in  making  Harvard  stu 
dents  and  Harvard  graduates  gener 
ally  write  with  unobtrusive  but  certain 
skill.  One  would  never  dream  of  de 
manding  from  them  incessant  or  even 
frequent  literary  creation.  One  might 
dare  hope,  however,  that  the  faithfulness 
of  our  teaching  and  the  regularity  of 
their  work — both  of  which  I  believe  in 
disputable — might  ultimately  establish 
something  like  a  firm  standard  of  ex 
pression.  Whether  it  has  done  so  or 
not,  I  will  leave  you  to  judge. 

At  this  moment  I  have  before  me  a 
little  set  of  critical  papers,  lately  submit 
ted  to  me,  after  several  weeks'  notice,  by 
an  advanced  class  in  literature.  I  will 
take  from  them  a  half-dozen  sentences, 
literally  at  random.  Here  is  the  first  on 
which  my  eye  lights:  "His  songs  are 
[  168  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

known  and  remembered  by  all,  they  are 
recited  in  the  district  school,  and  read 
around  the  fireside  of  the  rich  and  the 
cultured."  Here  is  the  next:  "Though 
he  may  not  prove  in  time  to  be  the  great 
est  of  American  authors  or  the  most 
representative,  he  certainly  will  hold  a 
prominent  place  in  this  epoch  of  our  lit 
erary  history."  The  third  to  which  I  turn 
— they  are  all  by  different  men — runs  as 
follows :  "  Born  into  a  small  printing  es 
tablishment,  passing  his  boyhood  among 
type  fonts  and  the  odor  of  printers'  ink, 
engaging  his  young  manhood  in  jour 
nalistic  pursuits,  he  paved  the  way  for 
future  editorship,  and,  above  all,  learned 
to  know  the  value  of  copy."  A  shade 
more  sense  of  composition  here,  perhaps ; 
but  as  to  skill,  we  will  not  reason,  but 
glance  and  pass.  Our  fourth  example 
is  less  confused,  and  displays  trace  of 
intensity:  "A  French  writer  four  years 
[  169  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

ago  said  that  the  only  receipt  for  creat 
ing  interest  in  fiction  nowadays  is  'to 
smash  the  Ten  Commandments,'  but 
Lanier's  genius  shrank  in  moral  recoil 
from  the  pollution  of  this  desperate  and 
devilish  device."  Fifthly  comes  the  fol 
lowing:  "Puritanic  sternness  and  se 
verity  characterise  the  homes  of  a  peo 
ple  who  for  time  immemorial  have  been 
noted  for  their  gentleness  and  sweetness 
of  temper,  and  the  concord  in  their 
home-life."  It  is  fair  to  explain  that 
the  writer  of  these  impressive  words 
was  endeavouring  to  show  that  Dr. 
Mitchell  misunderstands  Eighteenth 
Century  Philadelphia  Quakers;  but  we 
can  hardly  agree  that  the  deserving 
young  gentleman  has  made  his  point 
felicitously.  Our  sixth  passage  runs 
thus:  "I  take  it  that  this  very  lack  of 
appreciation  of  what  we  are  and  what 
we  might  be  is  the  very  fruitful  source 
[  170  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

of  both  mobs  and  murders  and  graft  in 
every  sphere  of  our  social  galaxy." 

Now  each  of  these  six  separate  sen 
tences  from  six  different  men  is  gram 
matically  tolerable.  Each  is  sensible,  or 
at  least  rational.  Each  implies  a  certain 
degree  of  literary  appreciation.  Only 
one,  however,  indicates  deliberate  effort 
to  compose, — to  put  a  word,  or  a  clause, 
or  a  phrase,  where  it  really  belongs, — 
and  that  is  the  most  obviously  unskilful 
of  the  whole  half-dozen.  Yet  all  these 
men  have  studied  composition,  as  a  thing 
apart;  two  of  them,  if  I  am  not  mis 
taken,  have  been  held  distinguished  stu 
dents  thereof;  and  at  least  one  of  them 
has  either  taught  the  art,  or  proposed 
himself  for  the  position  of  a  teacher 
thereof.  To  use  a  technical  term  of 
my  own,  based  on  the  fact  that  effective 
composition  conscientiously  or  instinc 
tively  observes  a  few  simple  principles,  a 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

melancholy  conclusion  seems  to  follow : 
the  present  result  of  our  heroic  experi 
ment  to  teach  composition  by  itself  is  a 
general  habit  of  style,  among  our  pupils, 
best  described  by  the  word  unprincipled. 
A  curious  example  of  what  I  have  in 
mind  has  lately  come  to  my  notice  in 
an  interesting  essay  on  Addison.  The 
writer,  though  not,  I  believe,  trained  at 
Harvard,  has  certainly  devoted  faithful 
work  elsewhere  to  the  study  and  the 
teaching  of  composition,  in  which  com 
petent  people  have  pronounced  him 
expert;  and  there  can  be  no  question 
of  his  general  culture  and  accomplish 
ment.  Yet,  somehow,  I  found  his 
essay  tediously  hard  to  read.  A  com 
parison  of  one  passage  with  the  text 
which  it  attempted  to  paraphrase 
showed  me — and  I  hope  will  show  you 
— why.  It  runs  thus :  "  Within  the  es 
says,  further  divisions  are  made.  The 
[  172  1 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

beauties  of  the  fourth  book  are  consid 
ered  under  three  heads:  ' pictures  of 
still  life  .  .  .  machines  .  .  .  the  con 
duct  of  Adam  and  Eve.'  The  tenth 
book  is  considered  under  four  heads," 
and  so  on.  Now  that  quoted  passage 
is  so  far  from  Addisonian  in  effect  that 
I  could  not  help  turning  to  the  original 
to  see  what  had  been  left  out ;  and  here 
is  what  Addison  wrote:  "  WeTmay  con 
sider  the  beauties  of  the  fourth  book" — 
not,  you  may  observe,  "The  beauties 
of  the  fourth  book  are  considered" — 
"  under  three  heads.  In  the  first  are 
those  pictures  of  still  life  which  we 
meet  with  in  the  descriptions  of  Eden, 
Paradise,  Adam's  Bower,  etc.  In  the 
next  are  the  machines,  which  compre 
hend  the  speeches  and  behaviour  of  the 
good  and  bad  angels.  In  the  last  is  the 
conduct  of  Adam  and  Eve  who  are  the 
principal  actors  in  the  poem." — So  far 
[  173  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

Mr.  Addison.  In  the  matter  of  sum 
mary,  we  may  agree,  his  critic  was 
accurate.  The  summary,  however,  no 
more  gives  the  sense  of  the  original 
than  if  the  original  had  never  gladdened 
the  critic's  eye.  His  eye  I  say  inten 
tionally  ;  his  hearing,  I  am  told,  is  nor 
mal.  From  his  method  of  expression, 
you  might  rationally  have  supposed 
him  to  have  learned  the  arts  of  reading 
and  of  writing  in  an  asylum  for  the 
Deaf  and  Dumb. 

The  wonder  of  it  is  that  any  one 
could  write  so  insensitively  who  has 
long  been  under  the  influence  of  Addi 
son — that  any  one  could  prove  so  su 
premely  immune  from  literary  con 
tagion.  Something  beyond  the  frailty 
of  human  nature  seems  needful,  to 
account  for  such  robustness  of  resist 
ance.  Twenty  or  thirty  years  ago  I 
should  have  attributed  this  callousness 
F  174  1 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

to  lack  of  training;  I  should  unhesita 
tingly  have  prescribed  course  after 
course  in  English  composition,  much  as 
grimly  spectacled  resident  physicians 
in  France  or  Germany  bid  you  take 
bath  after  bath,  and  come  back  for 
more  next  year.  Now,  sadder  if  not 
wiser,  I  am  rather  disposed  to  wonder 
whether  one  chief  difference  between 
Addison  and  his  critic  may  not  be 
found  in  the  simple  fact  that  of  two 
sensible  human  beings,  both  at  the 
moments  of  their  writing  normally  free 
from  inspiration,  the  one  had  never 
studied  English  composition  as  a  thing 
apart,  and  the  other  had  so  long  studied 
and  taught  it  as  a  thing  apart  that  he 
had  grown  fatally  unable  to  associate 
it  in  practice  with  anything  else  what 
soever.  In  that  event,  every  new  course 
of  composition,  given  or  taken,  would 
probably  aggravate  his  malady,  or  in- 
[  175  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

crease  his  robustness  of  resistance,  as 
you  prefer.  The  tonic  prescription 
would  not  be  to  study  composition;  it 
would  be  to  compose. 

For  even  though  the  study  and  the 
practice  of  composition,  or  of  expres 
sion,  as  a  thing  apart  generally  prove 
unprofitable,  nothing  can  avoid  the  fact 
that,  if  we  are  to  grow  into  more  knowl^ 
edge  and  wisdom,  it  must  be  by  some 
process  of  putting  together  things  which 
belong  together  yet  occur  apart.  Of 
such  affinities,  incessantly  separate  yet 
insistently  demanding  union,  none  is 
more  teasingly  constant  than  that  which 
makes  thought  demand  expression  and 
expression  demand  thought.  There  is 
need,  we  saw  a  little  while  ago,  even  of 
history  to  understand  literature,  and  of 
literature  to  understand  history.  There 
is  more  insistent  need  still  of  words  if 
we  would  ever  know  the  slightest  shred 
[  176  ] 


y 

THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

of  either  history  or  literature — apart  or 
together.  Nothing  but  words,  duly  com 
posed,  can  ever  tell  us  anything  what 
ever  about  either  of  them.  If  in  turn 
we  would  ever  tell  others  anything  about 
them,  we  must  ourselves  have  recourse 
chiefly  and  strenuously  to  words.  What 
thus  turns  out  to  be  the  case,  too,  con 
cerning  history  and  literature,  is  equally 
the  case  when  we  come  to  deal  with  the 
myriad  other  facts  which  we  must  put 
together,  first  for  ourselves,  and  then  for 
others,  if  our  thought  and  our  utterance 
in  this  world  are  to  have  any  semblance 
of  intellectual  meaning.  So  far  as  we 
are  alive  and  mean  to  make  our  lives 
dynamic,  we  must  incessantly  and  cour 
ageously  compose,  in  vastly  various, 
vastly  changing,  always  experimental, 
bravely  vital  ways. 

Now  it  is  quite  possible  that,  after  all 
my  years  of  attempt  to  practise  the  doc- 
[  177  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

trine  I  am  trying  to  expound,  I  may 
seem  here  to  have  asserted  that,  al 
though  the  study  of  composition  is  of 
prime  importance,  there  is  really  no  use 
in  studying  the  subject  at  all.  If  I  have 
produced  any  such  paradoxical  impres 
sion,  I  have  blundered  sadly.  What  has 
truly  been  in  my  mind  is  not  that  our 
courageous  experiments  in  the  teaching 
and  the  study  of  composition  as  a 
thing  apart  have  been  fruitless;  it  is 
rather  that  they  have  led  to  unfore 
seen  conclusions.  They  have  not  yet 
demonstrated,  to  be  sure,  that  compo 
sition  cannot  be  fruitfully  studied  all 
alone;  but  they  have  gone  so  far  to 
ward  such  demonstration,  I  believe, 
that  every  bit  of  them  will  in  due 
time  thus  be  justified.  It  took  al 
chemy  to  make  chemistry;  there  is 
no  reason  to  repine  for  any  amount 
of  experiment  which  may  finally  show 
[  178. ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

us  how  to  do  truly  constructive  work 
in  composition. 

Just  what  form  this  constructive  work 
may  take  no  one  can  surely  prophesy. 
The  problem  involved  in  it  is  not  soli 
tary.  Something  like  it  seems  evident 
everywhere  throughout  the  range  of 
modern  education,  which  has  discarded 
its  old  formulas  and  has  not  yet  re 
placed  them  by  valid  substitutes.  Not 
very  long  ago  I  touched  on  this  gen 
eral  matter,  in  an  address  of  which  the 
subject  was  the  Mystery  of  Education. 
To  detail  the  substance  of  this  discus 
sion  would  be  needless  here.  One  phase 
of  it,  however,  I  may  briefly  recount,  for 
it  will  help  us,  I  think,  to  see  how  the 
study  of  composition  and  of  expression 
may  in  time  profitably  be  pursued;  and, 
in  pointing  this  out,  I  shall  perhaps  make 
clearer  than  at  first  the  broad  general 
isations  on  which  I  begin  to  base  it. 
[  179  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

For  the  instant,  I  shall  therefore  ask 
you  to  forget  what  we  have  hitherto 
been  considering  and  to  inquire  only 
what  man  is  and  where — man,  the 
agent  and  the  patient  of  all  educational 
processes  whatsoever.  In  the  universe, 
in  this  world,  in  history,  in  time,  in 
space,  he  is  surrounded  by  a  surgently 
moving  environment  to  which  we  may 
give  the  name  of  force.  Force  is  about 
him  everywhere,  incessantly  and  infi 
nitely  altering  the  conditions  which 
seem  least  mutable.  Here  and  now, 
for  example,  we  have  been  together  only 
for  what  seem  a  few  every-day  minutes. 
Yet  even  as  I  have  uttered  these  words, 
some  instant  of  time  has  flitted  from 
the  impenetrable  future  to  the  irrevo 
cable  past.  The  sun  at  this  instant 
lights  the  world  from  another  angle 
than  that  from  whence  his  light  came 
when  we  entered  on  this  discussion. 
[  180  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

The  stars  have  moved  somewhither  in 
their  courses ;  and  men  have  died ;  and 
men-children  have  come  into  being; 
and  all  the  mystery  about  us,  eternally 
the  same,  has  undergone  some  aspect 
of  its  eternal  change.  In  this  universe 
of  stirring  force  man  finds  himself 
conscious.  His  task  is  as  best  he  may 
to  adapt  himself  to  his  environment  of 
incessant  change,  and  of  change  which 
in  our  time  is  swiftly  and  surely  accel 
erating  its  historic  rate  of  mutation. 

Man's  adaptation  of  himself  to  this 
environment  of  force  I  have  ventured 
to  liken  to  the  office  of  a  lens,  which 
duly  placed  can  accumulate  and  diffuse 
or  concentrate  rays  of  light.  A  con 
scious,  flexible,  animate  focus  of  force, 
we  may  call  man,  surrounded  by  sur- 
gent  rays  or  streams  of  that  same  force, 
sweeping  him  onward  from  past  to  fut 
ure,  yet  swirling  onward  themselves,  all 


THE  STUDY   OF  EXPRESSION 

the  while,  at  a  rate  increasingly  beyond 
that  at  which  they  impel  his  little, 
flashing,  mortal  self.  Somehow  he  can 
gather  together  a  few  of  these  rays  or 
streams  of  force  so  vastly  unimprisoned 
around  him;  and  among  the  rays  or 
streams  which  he  can  momentarily 
accumulate,  in  part,  are  those  which 
we  name  science  and  history  and  liter 
ature.  One  phase  of  his  focal  task  is 
to  compose  them,  to  fuse  them.  The 
other  phase  of  it,  and  not  the  less  wor 
thy,  is  that  on  which  we  have  been 
dwelling  together  here — the  expression 
of  that  fusion  in  such  manner  as  shall 
convey  the  full  and  living  vitality  of  it 
to  others  than  himself.  To  help  us  in 
this  effort  is  the  true  purpose  of  the 
study  of  composition,  a  study  which,  if 
we  pursue  it  aright,  may  well  be  held 
among  the  noblest  of  the  ends  and 
aims  of  earnest  life. 

[    182   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

Once  assured  that  composition,  even 
in  words  alone,  deserves  our  loving 
care,  we  may  accordingly  find  stimulus 
rather  than  discouragement  in  the  fact 
that  the  principles  of  it  are  marvel 
lously  simple.  The  best  workmen,  they 
tell  us,  are  those  who  need  the  fewest 
tools.  The  secret  of  skill  is  not  knowl 
edge  but  practice.  Practice  alone,  I 
sometimes  think,  is  better  a  hundred 
fold  than  knowledge  alone;  and  prac 
tice  hampered  by  conscious  knowledge 
is  halting  enough  at  best;  but  practice 
guided  by  knowledge  so  mastered  that 
the  teachings  of  knowledge  have  be 
come  instinctive  will  bring  us  as  near 
as  the  limitations  of  our  earthly  life 
can  permit  to  the  Divine  ideal  of  per 
fection. 

If  these  considerations  have  not 
been  all  wrong,  we  can  now  begin  to 
perceive  why,  in  the  past,  the  study  of 
[  183  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

composition,  and  of  expression,  has 
been  so  far  from  satisfactory.  The 
trouble  has  sprung  from  the  fact  that 
composition  has  generally  been  studied 
as  if  it  were  an  empty  abstraction,  to  be 
considered  and  used  apart,  to  be  laid 
aside  when  we  have  to  do  with  other 
matters  than  itself.  Thus  we  have 
come  to  consider  it  as  something,  like 
its  own  principles,  which  can  be  mas 
tered  once  for  all,  and  then  contentedly 
forgotten.  Instead,  I  hope  we  may  now 
see,  the  very  essence  of  its  being  lies  in 
the  truth  that  it  must  incessantly  con 
cern  all  things  and  all  of  us.  Apprehen 
sion  of  its  principles  is  well  worth  while, 
but  only  in  so  far  as  these  principles 
shall  serve  us  as  guides  in  careers 
of  unflinching  and  unremittent  study. 
Our  focal  task,  when  we  would  duly 
express  the  rays  of  force  collected  and 
composed  within  our  conscious  selves, 
[  184  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

is  unendingly  and  stimulatingly  ex 
perimental.  It  is  to  find  our  words 
and  our  phrases — to  put  together  our 
dead  symbols  of  living  thought  and 
emotion — until,  as  our  need  may  be, 
they  shall  diffuse  our  meaning  through 
out  the  present  and  the  future,  or  shall 
burn  it  deep  in  the  one  heart  which  we 
yearn  to  make  responsive  to  our  own. 
All  of  which,  I  dare  say,  sounds  too 
vague  to  have  much  meaning.  Trans 
lated  into  every-day  terms,  you  will  find 
it  to  signify  that  Mr.  Addison,  for  ex 
ample,  never  penned  a  line  without 
penning  it  as  well  as  he  could,  consid 
ering  at  one  and  the  same  time  what  he 
had  to  say  and  whom  he  had  to  say  it  to ; 
but  that  the  critic  of  Mr.  Addison, 
having  duly  considered  at  other  times 
and  places  how  things  ought  to  be 
written  on  general  principles,  contented 
himself  in  this  instance  with  the  mere 
[  185  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

act  of  penning,  serenely  regardless  of 
how  well  he  wrote,  or  of  who  might 
have  the  trouble  of  trying  to  make  out 
what  he  meant.  It  is  not  Addison's 
positive  style  which  is  so  admirable;  it 
is  the  fact  that  throughout  his  work 
you  can  feel  the  masterly  touch  of  one 
who  composes  not  only  his  words  and 
sentences,  but  all  his  powers,  in  the 
full  though  not  sonorous  harmony 
which  has  made  him  gently  enduring. 

That  he  writes  with  a  grace  and 
ease  no  longer  quite  the  fashion  is  evi 
dently  true.  So  is  the  fact  that  this 
beautiful  urbanity  is  a  positively  delight 
ful  quality.  The  final  merit  of  his  style, 
however,  lies  in  nothing  formal,  but  in 
the  completeness  of  its  adaptation  to 
his  meaning  and  his  purpose.  Captious 
temper,  indeed,  might  sometimes  won 
der  whether  Addison's  adaptation  of 
his  style  to  his  concepts  were  not  a 
[  186  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

shade  too  fine,  whether  in  admiration 
of  its  fineness  a  reader  might  not  find  at 
tention  distracted  from  the  significance 
of  the  words  to  the  words  themselves. 
For  my  own  part,  I  have  rarely  if  ever 
found  this  the  case.  To  me,  accord 
ingly,  the  Spectator — like  Gulliver,  or 
Othello,  or  Macaulay's  Essay  on  Lord 
Clive,  or  the  Newcomes — seems  alto 
gether  admirable.  The  style  of  a  mas 
terpiece  is  excellent  just  because  it  never 
obtrudes  itself  between  a  reader  and  the 
meaning  which  it  radiantly  expresses. 
A  comparison  with  not  quite  masterly 
works  of  eminent  literature  may  define 
what  I  mean.  One  decisive  reason 
why  eccentric  writing,  like  Carlyle's, 
or  Browning's,  or  Walt  Whitman's,  or 
George  Meredith's,  wonderful  though 
it  be,  can  never  command  unqualified 
admiration  is  to  be  found  in  the  un 
happy  fact  that  any  obviously  unusual 
[  187  ]. 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

style  interposes  itself  between  our  wits 
and  the  meaning  which  we  are  trying  to 
apprehend.  The  ideal  of  expression  is 
a  momentary  fusion  of  what  the  writer 
means  with  what  the  reader  thinks  and 
feels.  Any  grace,  any  ingenuity  of  style 
favourable  to  this  end,  is  a  merit.  Any 
which  distracts  attention  to  itself  is  a 
blemish.  Composition,  to  revert  to  the 
word  with  which  we  have  been  playing 
so  long,  should  ideally  be  complete — 
fusing  the  knowledge,  the  character, 
the  temper,  the  words  of  the  writer  or 
speaker  with  the  attention  and  the  full 
receptive  power  of  readers  and  hearers. 
Again  we  may  seem  to  be  losing  our 
selves  in  abstraction.  To  illustrate 
what  I  have  in  mind  I  may  recall  the 
story  of  a  lawyer  in  his  time  eminent  at 
the  New  England  Bar.  He  was  not  a 
brilliant  man,  as  I  remember  him,  nor 
remarkable  for  profound  learning  or 
[  188  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

exceptional  power  of  intellect.  His 
fundamental  quality  was  honest,  robust, 
and  cheerful  good  sense.  His  profes 
sional  achievement  took  the  form  of 
the  frequent  winning  of  doubtful  cases, 
against  adversaries  whom  off-hand  you 
might  have  thought  stronger  than  he. 
When  asked  once  how  he  had  man 
aged  to  secure  an  unexpected  verdict 
in  spite  of  alertly  able  opposition,  he 
answered  very  simply  that  it  was  by 
observing  a  rule  taught  him  by  experi 
ence.  To  impress  a  judge  or  a  jury, 
he  opined,  you  must  hold  their  attention ; 
and  no  one  can  hold  it  very  long.  When 
you  rise  to  address  them,  accordingly, 
with  the  advantage  of  a  novelty  sure  to 
attract  it  for  the  moment,  you  will  do 
well  to  state  your  case  while  they  are 
still  attending  to  you.  Then  develop 
it  as  fully  as  they  will  let  you.  When 
their  attention  begins  to  wander,  the 
[  189  ] 


i\ 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

fault  is  not  theirs,  but  yours;  so  never 
hesitate  to  bring  your  remarks  to  a 
close,  no  matter  how  much  more  you 
may  have  left  to  say.  All  the  rest 
would  be  worse  than  a  waste  of  words 
and  time;  it  would  be  a  bore;  and  no 
matter  how  just  your  judge,  nor  how 
honest  your  jury,  human  beings  cannot 
help  a  little  resentment  against  any 
fellow-creature  who  has  bored  them. 

A  colleague  of  mine  at  Harvard,  who 
knew  this  old  lawyer  well,  professes 
that  he  has  applied  the  good  man's 
principles  to  college  lectures.  If  stu 
dents  do  not  follow  a  lecture,  they 
learn  nothing  from  it.  If  in  a  given 
class-room,  the  attention  of  many  is 
obviously  wandering  from  the  matter 
in  hand,  the  fault  is  not  theirs,  but  the 
lecturer's.  Very  good.  In  such  cir 
cumstances,  my  colleague  declares,  he 
attempts  to  regain  the  attention  of  his 
[  190  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

pupils.  If  he  succeeds,  the  lecture  goes 
on.  If  he  fails,  he  does  not  hesitate  to 
dismiss  his  class,  sadly  admitting  him 
self  unable  for  the  hapless  moment  so  to 
compose  what  he  has  to  say  as  to  put 
it  in  contact  with  the  wits  of  his  hearers. 
For  composition,  in  its  broadest 
meaning,  implies  something  more  than 
the  tendency  generally  encouraged  by 
the  experience  of  college  life — the  life 
from  which  you  are  just  emerging;  the 
life  which  long  ago  made  us  elders 
something  else  than  we  should  have 
been  without  it.  Thereby,  each  in  his 
degree,  we  have  started  on  what  should 
be  our  life-long  task  of  thinking  things 
together.  This  primal  phase  of  com 
position  is  perhaps  its  most  profound. 
Without  the  added  vitality  of  articulate 
expression,  however,  it  can  come  to 
little.  We  must  compose  in  words  the 
fusion  of  thought  and  emotion  taught 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

us  by  learning  and  experience;  and  we 
must  not  rest  content  with  the  mere  fact 
of  expression  until,  so  far  as  in  us  lies, 
what  we  are  trying  to  express  has  been 
placed  as  close  as  we  can  place  it  to 
the  thought  and  emotion  of  those  others 
than  ourselves  whom  we  make  effort 
to  inform,  to  influence,  to  check,  to 
guide,  to  inspire.  One  expresses  best 
when  one  says  what  one  means,  when 
one  holds  attention,  and  when — what 
ever  one's  faults  or  infirmities — one 
rather  attracts  than  repels  the  sympa 
thy  of  those  who  attend. 

Mastery  of  expression  throughout  is 
the  ideal  which  we  have  striven  to  keep 
in  mind;  and  there  is  hardly  need  to 
recall  how  the  whole  record  of  human 
history  shows  us  few  unchallenged 
masters  of  anything.  So  as  I  have 
spoken  here  to-day,  you  may  well  have 
felt  an  ironical  contrast  between  the 

[    192   ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

somewhat  elusive  thoughts  which  I  have 
attempted  to  imprison  in  words  and  the 
none  too  felicitous  words  themselves. 
If  you  will  let  yourselves  feel,  however, 
the  earnestness  of  my  effort  not  to 
waste  the  hour  which  your  kindness  has 
let  us  pass  together,  I  venture  to  hope 
that  it  will  linger  happily  in  your  mem 
ories,  as  it  surely  will  linger  in  mine. 
For  throughout  it  there  has  hovered 
around  us  one  truth  in  which  we  all 
agree.  The  chief  end  of  life,  we  may 
sometimes  come  to  feel,  is  to  put  to 
gether  and  to  bind  together  what  with 
out  us  might  stay  forever  separate. 
There  could  hardly  be  a  more  gracious 
act  to  this  end  than  the  friendly  invita 
tion  which  has  brought  me  to  meet  you 
here.  Vague  though  my  response  to  it 
may  perhaps  have  seemed,  I  shall  there 
fore  trust  you  to  understand  that  I  have 
tried  to  do  my  responsive  part  of  friend- 
[  193  ] 


THE  STUDY  OF  EXPRESSION 

ship — the  friendship  now  so  happily 
binding  together  your  college  and  mine, 
your  State  and  mine,  your  future  and 
mine,  in  the  happy  concord  of  our 
common  country. 


[   194 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

An    Address    during    the    Poe    Centenary    at    the 
University    of    Virginia,    19    January,    1909. 

First  printed  in  "  The  Book  of  the  Poe  Centenary." 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

MR.  PRESIDENT,  LADIES   AND   GEN 
TLEMEN  : 

On  the  19th  of  January,  1809,  Edgar 
Allan  Poe  was  born  in  Boston.  The 
fact,  to  be  sure,  has  been  disputed; 
for  the  scanty  and  defective  vital 
records  of  that  period  make  no  men 
tion  of  it.  It  remains,  however,  cer 
tain.  Almost  exactly  a  hundred  years 
later,  my  friend,  Mr.  Walter  Watkins, 
impelled  by  occasional  statements  that 
Poe  was  born  elsewhere,  collected, 
from  the  Boston  newspapers  of  1808 
and  1809,  notices  of  all  the  plays  in 
which  the  parents  of  Poe  appeared 
[  197  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

during  that  season.  These  demon 
strate  that  Mrs.  Poe  withdrew  from  the 
stage  about  Christmas  time,  1808,  and 
reappeared  only  on  February  9th,  1809, 
when  one  of  the  newspapers  congrat 
ulated  her  on  her  happy  recovery  from 
her  confinement.  This  is  apparently 
the  most  nearly  contemporary  record  of 
Poe's  birth.  The  researches  of  Mr. 
Watkins  did  not  end  here.  All  record 
of  Poe's  birthplace  was  supposed  to  have 
been  lost;  and  indeed  there  is  little 
likelihood  that  Poe  himself  ever  knew 
just  where  it  was.  By  examining  the 
tax  lists  for  1808  and  1809,  Mr.  Wat- 
kins  discovered  that  David  Poe,  the 
father  of  the  poet,  was  taxed  that  year 
as  resident  in  a  house  owned  by  one 
Henry  Haviland,  who  had  bought  the 
property,  a  few  years  before,  from  a 
Mr.  Haskins — a  kinsman,  I  believe,  of 
the  mother  of  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson. 
[  198  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

The  house  was  pulled  down  some  fifty 
years  ago,  but  Mr.  Watkins  has  ascer 
tained  from  the  records  that  it  was 
situated  at  what  is  now  No.  62  Carver 
Street.  In  1809,  this  was  a  respectable, 
though  not  a  fashionable,  part  of  the 
city.  There  Poe  was  born. 

The  circumstances  of  his  career 
were  restless;  on  the  whole,  they  were 
solitary.  Throughout  his  forty  years 
of  mortal  sunlight  and  shadow  he  was 
never  quite  in  accord  with  his  sur 
roundings.  He  was  never  tried  by 
either  of  the  tests  for  which  ambition 
chiefly  longs — the  gravely  happy  test  of 
wide  responsibility,  or  the  stimulatingly 
happy  test  of  dominant  success.  Troub 
lous  from  beginning  to  end  his  earthly 
life  seems;  to  him  this  world  could 
not  often  have  smiled  contagiously 
sympathetic.  So  much  is  clear;  and 
a  little  more  is  clear  as  well.  When  he 
[  199  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

sought  sympathy,  or  found  semblance 
of  it,  and  thus  for  a  little  while  could 
feel  trouble  assuaged,  he  could  find  it 
most  nearly  among  those  generous 
phases  of  Southern  spirit  which  sur 
rounded  the  happier  years  of  his  youth. 
There  was  little  trace  of  it,  for  him,  in 
the  still  half-Puritan  atmosphere  of  that 
New  England  where  he  chanced,  a 
stranger,  to  see  the  light. 

So  it  was  with  deep  and  reverent 
sense  of  your  Southern  generosity  that 
I  received  your  grave  and  friendly 
summons  to  join  with  you  here  and 
now.  Here,  in  this  sanctuary  of  Vir 
ginia  tradition,  you  have  not  scrupled 
to  call  me  from  the  heart  of  New  Eng 
land,  to  pay  tribute  not  only  for  myself, 
and  for  my  own  people,  but  tribute  in 
the  name  of  us  all,  to  the  memory  of 
Poe.  If  one  could  only  feel  sure  of  per 
forming  such  a  task  wrorthily,  no  task, 
[  200  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN   FOE 

of  duty  or  of  privilege,  could  be  more 
solemnly  happy.  For  none  could  more 
wonderfully  imply  how  Virginians  and 
the  people  of  New  England — each  still 
themselves — have  so  outlived  their  long 
spiritual  misunderstandings  of  one  an 
other  that  with  all  our  hearts  we  can 
gladly  join  together,  as  fellow  country 
men,  in  celebrating  the  memory  of  one 
recognised  everywhere  as  the  fellow- 
countryman  of  us  all. 

Everywhere  is  a  nowise  hyperbolic 
word  to  describe  the  extent  of  Poe's 
constantly  extending  fame,  sixty  years 
after  they  laid  him  in  his  grave.  His 
name  is  not  only  eminent  in  the  literary 
history  of  Virginia,  or  of  New  Ycfrk,  or 
of  America ;  it  has  proved  itself  among 
the  very  few  of  those  native  to  America 
which  have  commanded  and  have  jus 
tified  admiration  throughout  the  civil 
ised  world.  Even  this  does  not  tell 
[  201  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

the  whole  story.  So  far  as  we  can  now 
discern,  he  has  securely  risen  above 
the  mists  of  time  and  the  fogs  of  acci 
dent.  His  work  may  appeal  to  you  or 
leave  you  deaf;  you  may  adulate  it  or 
scrutinise  it,  as  you  will;  you  may  dis 
pute  as  long  and  as  fruitlessly  as  you 
please  concerning  its  positive  signifi 
cance  or  the  magnitude  of  its  greatness. 
The  one  thing  which  you  cannot  do — 
the  thing  for  which  the  moment  is  for 
ever  past — is  to  neglect  it.  Forever 
past,  as  well,  all  loyal  Americans  must 
gladly  find  the  moment — if  indeed 
there  ever  was  a  moment — when  any 
of  us  could  even  for  an  instant  regret  it. 
There  is  no  longer  room  for  any  manner 
of  question  that  the  writings  of  Poe  are 
among  the  still  few  claims  which  Amer 
ica  can  as  yet  urge  unchallenged  in 
proof  that  our  country  has  enriched 
permanent  literature.  Even  with  no 
[  202  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

other  reason  than  this,  loyal  .Americans 
must  already  unite  in  cherishing  his 
memory. 

So  true,  so  obvious,  this  must  seem 
to-day  that  we  are  prone,  in  accepting 
it,  to  forget  the  marvel  of  it,  as  we  for 
get  the  marvels  of  Nature — of  sunrise, 
of  sleep,  of  birth,  of  memory  itself. 
The  marvel  of  it,  in  truth,  is  none  the 
less  reverend  because,  like  these,  we 
need  never  find  it  miraculous.  Hap 
pily  for  us  all — happily  for  all  the 
world — Poe  is  not  an  isolated,  sporadic 
phenomenon  in  our  national  history. 
He  was  an  American  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century.  If  we  ponder  never  so  little 
on  those  commonplace  wrords,  we  shall 
find  them  charged  with  stirring  truth. 
To  summarise  the  life  of  any  nation, 
there  is  no  better  way  than  to  turn  to 
the  successive  centuries  of  its  history, 
and  to  ask  yourself,  with  no  delay  of 
[  203  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

slow  or  painful  study,  what  names  and 
what  memories,  unborn  at  the  begin 
ning  of  these  epochs,  were  in  perpetual 
existence  when  they  ended.  When  we 
thus  consider  our  United  States  of 
America,  the  spiritual  splendour  of  the 
Nineteenth  Century  glows  amazing. 

That  Nineteenth  Century,  as  we  all 
gravely  know,  was  by  no  means  a 
period  of  national  concord.  Rather, 
far  and  wide,  it  was  a  period  when  the 
old  order  was  fatally  passing,  yielding 
place  to  new.  Thus  inevitably,  through 
out  our  country,  it  was  a  period  of  hon 
est  and  noble  passion  running  to  the 
inspiring  height  of  spiritual  tragedy. 
For  no  tragedy  can  be  more  superbly 
inspiring  than  that  of  epochs  when 
earnestly  devoted  human  beings,  spir 
itually  at  one  in  loyalty  to  what  they 
believe  the  changeless  ideals  of  truth 
and  of  righteousness,  are  torn  asunder 
[  204  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

by  outbreaks  of  such  tremendous  his 
toric  forces  as  make  the  mechanical 
forces  of  Nature  seem  only  thin  para 
bles,  imaging  the  vaster  forces  still 
which  we  vainly  fancy  to  be  immaterial. 
It  is  not  until  times  like  these  begin  to 
fade  and  subside  into  the  irrevocable 
certainty  of  the  past  that  we  can  begin 
to  perceive  the  essential  unity  of  their 
grandeur.  Nothing  less  than  such  su 
preme  ordeal  of  conflict  can  finally 
prove  the  quality  and  the  measure  of 
heroes;  and  in  the  stress  and  strain,  no 
human  vision  can  truly  discern  them 
all ;  but  once  proved  deathless,  the 
heroes  stand  side  by  side,  immortally 
brethren.  So,  by  and  by,  we  come 
wondrously  to  perceive  that  we  may 
honour  our  own  heroes  most  worthily 
— most  in  the  spirit  which  they  truly 
embodied;  most,  I  believe,  as  they 
themselves  would  finally  bid  us,  if  our 
[  205  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

ears  could  still  catch  the  accents  of 
their  voices — when  we  honour  with 
them  their  brethren  who,  in  the  passing 
years  of  passion,  seemed  for  a  while 
their  foes. 

When  we  of  America  thus  contem 
plate  the  Nineteenth  Century,  we  can 
not  fail  to  rejoice  in  the  memories  it 
has  left  us.  They  are  so  many,  so  full 
of  inspiration,  so  various  in  all  but  the 
steadfastness  with  which  they  with 
stand  the  deadening  test  of  the  years, 
that  it  would  be  distracting,  and  even 
invidious,  to  call  the  roll  of  our  wor 
thies  at  a  moment  like  this.  What 
more  truly  and  deeply  concerns  us  is 
an  evident  historical  fact,  generally 
true  of  all  the  human  careers  on  which 
our  heroic  memories  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century  rest  unshaken.  Among  those 
careers  almost  all — North  and  South, 
East  and  West — won,  in  their  own 
[  206  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

time,  distinguished  public  recognition. 
What  I  have  in  mind  we  may  best 
realise,  perhaps,  if  for  a  moment  we 
imagine  ourselves  in  some  Nineteenth 
Century  congregation  of  our  country 
men,  similar  to  this  where  we  are  gath 
ered  together.  Fancy,  for  instance, 
the  companies  assembled  to  welcome 
Lafayette,  far  and  wide,  during  his  last 
visit  to  our  nation  which  he  had  helped 
call  into  being.  Among  the  American 
dignitaries  then  in  their  maturity,  and 
still  remembered  by  others  than  their 
own  descendants,  almost  every  one 
would  already  have  been  well  and 
widely  known.  A  local  stranger  in  any 
such  assemblage,  to  whom  his  host 
should  point  out  the  more  distinguished 
personages  there  present,  would  gener 
ally  have  found  their  names  not  only 
memorable  but  familiar,  just  as  we 
should  find  them  still.  What  would 
[  207  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

thus  have  been  the  case  in  1824  would 
have  stayed  so,  too,  five  and  twenty 
years  later.  The  heroes  of  our  olden 
time  were  mostly  gladdened  by  the 
consciousness  of  recognised  and  ac 
knowledged  eminence. 

Now,  in  contrast  with  them,  let  us 
try  to  imagine  a  figure  which  might 
perhaps  have  attracted  the  eye  in  some 
such  American  assemblage  sixty-five 
years  ago.  Glancing  about,  you  might 
very  likely  have  observed  a  slight, 
alert  man,  with  rather  lank,  dark  hair, 
and  deep,  restless  eyes.  His  aspect 
might  hauntingly  have  attracted  you, 
and  set  you  to  wondering  whether  he 
was  young  or  old.  On  the  whole  you 
might  probably  have  felt  that  he  looked 
distrustful,  defiant  if  not  almost  repel 
lent,  certainly  not  ingratiating  or  en 
gagingly  sympathetic.  Yet  there  would 
have  hovered  about  him  an  impalpable 
[  208  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

atmosphere  of  fascination,  which  would 
have  attracted  your  gaze  back  to  him 
again  and  again;  and  each  new  scru 
tiny  would  have  increased  your  impres 
sion  that  here  was  some  one  solitary, 
apart,  not  to  be  confused  with  the  rest. 
He  would  hardly  have  been  among  the 
more  notable  personages,  on  the  plat 
form  or  at  the  high  table.  You  might 
well  have  wondered  whether  anybody 
could  tell  you  his  name;  and  if,  in 
answer  to  a  question,  your  neighbour 
had  believed  that  this  was  Edgar  Allan 
Poe,  you  might  very  probably  have 
thought  the  name  unimportant.  You 
would,  perhaps,  have  had  a  general 
impression  that  he  had  written  for  a 
good  many  magazines,  and  the  like,— 
that  he  had  produced  stories,  and 
verses,  and  criticism, — but  the  chances 
are  that  you  would  not  clearly  have 
distinguished  him  unless  as  one  of  that 
[  209  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

affluent  company  of  literati  who  illus 
trated  the  '40's,  and  who  are  remem 
bered  now  only  because  their  names 
occur  in  essays  preserved  among  Poe's 
collected  works.  Almost  certainly  he 
would  hardly  have  impressed  you  as 
memorable.  His  rather  inconspicuous 
solitude  would  not  have  seemed  re 
markable.  Very  likely,  if  you  were  a 
stranger  thereabouts,  you  would  have 
paid  little  more  attention  to  his  pres 
ence,  but  would  rather  have  proceeded 
to  inquire  who  else,  of  more  solid 
quality,  was  then  and  there  worth 
looking  at. 

All  this  might  well  have  happened 
little  more  than  sixty  years  ago;  and 
though  to  some  of  us  sixty  years  may 
still  seem  to  stretch  long,  they  are  far 
from  transcending  the  period  of  hu 
man  memory.  It  would  be  by  no 
means  extraordinary  if  in  this  very  com- 
[  210  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN   POE 

pany,  here  present,  there  were  some 
who  can  remember  the  year  1845,  or 
the  election  of  President  Taylor.  Be 
yond  question,  every  one  of  us  has 
known,  with  something  like  contem 
porary  intimacy,  friends  and  relatives, 
only  a  little  older  than  ourselves  in 
seeming,  to  whom  those  years  re 
mained  as  vivid  as  you  and  I  shall  find 
the  administration  of  President  Roose 
velt.  That  olden  time,  in  fact,  when 
amid  such  congregations  as  this,  any 
where  throughout  America,  the  pres 
ence  of  Poe  would  hardly  have  been 
observed,  has  not  quite  faded  from 
living  recollection.  At  this  moment, 
nevertheless,  there  is  no  need  to  explain 
anywhere  why  we  are  come  together 
here,  from  far  and  wide,  to  honour  his 
memory.  Not  only  all  of  us  here  as 
sembled,  not  only  all  Virginia,  and  all 
New  York,  and  all  New  Enland,  and 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

all  our  American  countrymen  beside, 
but  the  whole  civilised  world  would  in 
stantly  and  eagerly  recognise  the  cer 
tainty  of  his  eminence.  What  he  was, 
while  still  enmeshed  in  the  perplexity 
of  earthly  circumstance,  is  already  a 
matter  of  little  else  than  idle  curiosity. 
What  he  is  admits  of  no  dispute.  So 

• 

long  as  the  name  of  America  shall 
endure,  the  name  of  Poe  will  persist, 
in  serene  certainty,  among  those  of  our 
approved  national  worthies. 

In  all  our  history,  I  believe,  there  is 
no  more  salient  contrast  than  this  be 
tween  the  man  in  life  and  his  immortal 
spirit.  Just  how  or  when  the  change 
came  to  be  we  need  not  trouble  our 
selves  to  dispute.  It  is  enough  for  us, 
during  this  little  while  when  we  are  to 
gether,  that  we  let  our  thoughts  dwell 
not  on  the  Poe  who  was  but  on  the 
Poe  who  is.  Even  then  we  shall  do 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

best  not  to  lose  ourselves  in  conjec 
tures  concerning  his  positive  magni 
tude,  or  his  ultimate  significance,  when 
you  measure  his  utterances  with  what 
we  conceive  to  be  absolute  truth,  or 
with  the  scheme  of  the  eternities.  We 
should  be  content  if  wre  can  begin  to 
assure  ourselves  of  what  he  is,  and 
of  why. 

The  Poe  whom  we  are  met  to  cele 
brate  is  not  the  man,  but  his  work. 
Furthermore,  it  is  by  no  means  all  the 
work  collected  in  those  volumes  where 
studious  people  can  now  trace,  with 
what  edification  may  ensue,  the  history, 
the  progress,  the  ebb  and  the  flow  of 
his  copious  literary  production.  His 
extensive  criticism  need  not  detain  or 
distract  us ;  it  is  mostly  concerned 
with  ephemeral  matters,  forgotten  ever 
since  the  years  when  it  was  written. 
His  philosophical  excursions,  fantas- 
[  213  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

tic  or  pregnant  as  the  case  may  finally 
prove  to  be,  we  need  hardly  notice.  The 
same  is  true  concerning  his  copious 
exposition  of  literary  principle,  super 
ficially  grave,  certainly  ingenious,  per 
haps  earnest,  perhaps  impishly  fantas 
tic.  All  of  these,  and  more  too,  would 
inevitably  force  themselves  on  our  con 
sideration  if  we  were  attempting  to  re 
vive  the  Poe  who  was.  At  this  mo 
ment,  however,  .we  may  neglect  them  as 
serenely  as  we  may  neglect  scrutiny  of 
outward  and  visible  signs,  of  such  ques 
tions  as  those  of  where  he  lived  and 
when  and  for  how  long,  of  what  he  did 
in  his  private  life,  of  whom  he  made 
love  to  and  what  he  ate  for  dinner,  of 
who  cut  his  waistcoats,  and  of  how — if 
at  all — he  paid  for  them. 

The  very  suggestion  of  such  details 
may  well  and  truly  seem  beneath  the 
dignity    of    this    moment.      They    are 
[  214  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

forced  into  conscious  recognition,  not 
by  any  tinge  of  inherent  value,  but  be 
cause  of  the  innocently  intrusive  ped 
antry  now  seemingly  inseparable  from 
the  ideal  of  scholarship.  We  have 
passed,  for  the  while,  beyond  the  tyr 
anny  of  that  scholarly  mood  which  used 
to  exahust  its  energy  in  analysis  of 
every  word  and  syllable  throughout  the 
range  of  literature.  From  sheer  reac 
tion,  I  sometimes  think,  we  are  apt 
nowadays,  when  concerned  with  litera 
ture,  to  pass  our  time,  even  less  fruitfully 
than  if  we  were  still  grammarians,  in 
researches  little  removed  from  the  im 
pertinence  of  gossip;  and  gossip  con 
cerning  memorable  men  and  women  is 
only  a  shade  less  futile  than  gossip 
concerning  the  ephemeral  beings  who 
flit  across  our  daily  vision.  So  far  as 
it  can  keep  us  awake  from  supersti 
tious  acceptance  of  superhuman  myth, 
[  215  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

it  may  perhaps  have  its  own  little  salu 
tary  function.  If  it  distract  us  from 
such  moods  of  deeper  sympathy  as 
start  the  vagrant  fancies  of  myth-mak 
ers,  it  does  mischief  as  misleading  as 
any  ever  wrought  by  formal  pedantry, 
and  without  the  lingering  grace  of  tra 
ditional  dignity.  Your  truly  sound 
scholarship  is  concerned  rather  with 
such  questions  as  we  are  properly 
concerned  with  here  and  now.  Its 
highest  hope,  in  literary  matters,  is  to 
assert  and  to  maintain  persistent  facts 
in  their  permanent  values.  In  the  case 
of  Poe,  for  example,  its  chief  questions 
are  first  of  what  from  among  his  copi 
ous  and  varied  work  has  incontestably 
survived  the  conditions  of  his  human 
environment,  and  secondly  of  why  this 
survival  has  occurred.  What  contri 
bution  did  Poe  make  to  lasting  liter 
ature?  Does  this  justly  belong  to  the 
[  216  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

literature  not  only  of  America  but  of 
the  world  ?  In  brief,  why  is  he  so 
memorable  as  we  all  acknowledge  by 
our  presence  here  to-day  ? 

Stated  thus,  these  questions  are  not 
very  hard  to  answer.  The  Poe  of  liter 
ature  is  the  writer  of  a  good  many  tales, 
or  short  stories,  and  of  a  few  intensely 
individual,  though  not  deeply  confiden 
tial,  poems.  Stories  and  poems  alike 
stand  apart  not  only  from  all  others  in 
the  literature  of  America,  but — I  be 
lieve  we  may  agree — from  any  others 
anywhere.  Some  profoundly,  some 
rather  more  superficially,  they  all  pos 
sess,  in  their  due  degree,  an  impalpable 
quality  which  the  most  subtle  of  us 
might  well  be  at  pains  to  define,  but 
which  the  most  insensitive  man  imag 
inable  can  always,  surely,  recurrently 
feel.  The  most  remarkable  phase  of 
the  impression  they  thus  make  is  prob- 
[  217  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

ably  the  complete  and  absolute  cer 
tainty  of  its  recurrence.  Turn,  when 
ever  you  will  and  in  whatever  mood,  to 
any  of  Poe's  work  which  has  proved 
more  than  ephemeral.  Tale  or  poem, 
it  may  chance  either  to  appeal  to  you 
or  to  repel  you.  In  one  mood  you  may 
think  it  inspired;  in  another,  you  may 
find  it  little  better  than  prankishly  arti 
ficial.  You  may  praise  it  until  dissent 
gape  breathless  at  your  superlatives; 
or  you  may  relentlessly  point  out  what 
you  are  pleased  to  believe  its  limita 
tions,  its  artificialities,  its  patent  de 
fects.  Even  then,  a  very  simple  question 
must  bring  you  to  pause.  Let  anybody 
ask  you  what  this  piece  of  literature  is 
like,  or  what  is  like  it — let  anybody 
ask  with  what  we  should  match  it. 
Whether  you  love  it  or  are  tempted  to 
disdain  it,  you  must  be  forced  to  the 
admission  that  it  is  almost  unique. 
[  218  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

Whatever  its  ultimate  significance,  the 
better  work  of  Poe  remains  altogether 
itself,  and  therefore  altogether  his. 
This  gleams  the  more  vividly  when 
you  come  to  recognise  how  his  indi 
viduality  asserts  itself  to  you,  whatever 
your  own  passing  mood,  under  all 
imaginable  conditions.  The  utterance 
of  Poe  is  as  incontestably,  as  trium 
phantly  itself  as  is  the  note  of  a  song 
bird — as  poets  abroad  have  found  the 
music  of  the  skylark,  or  of  the  nightin 
gale,  or  as  our  own  country-folk  find 
the  call  of  the  whippoorwill  echoing 
through  the  twilight  of  American  woods. 
His  individuality,  the  while,  is  of  a 
kind  for  which  our  language  hardly 
affords  a  name  more  exact  than  the 
name  poetic.  The  accident  that  we 
are  generally  accustomed  to  confuse 
the  spirit  of  poetry  with  some  common 
features  of  poetic  structure  can  mis- 
[  219  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

lead  us  only  for  a  moment.  Poetry  is 
not  essentially  a  matter  of  rhyme  or 
metre,  of  measure  and  quantity  in 
sound  or  syllable.  The  essence  of  it  is 
not  material  but  spiritual.  There  are 
few  more  comprehensive  descriptions 
of  it  than  the  most  familiar  in  the 
varied  range  of  English  literature: 

The  lunatic,  the  lover,  and  the  poet 

Are  of  imagination  all  compact : — 

One  sees  more  devils  than  vast  Hell  can  hold, — 

That  is,  the  madman;   the  lover,  all  as  frantic, 

Sees  Helen's  beauty  in  a  brow  of  Egypt; 

The  poet's  eye,  in  a  fine  frenzy  rolling, 

Doth  glance  from  heaven  to  earth,  from  earth 

to  heaven; 

And,  as  imagination  bodies  forth 
The  forms  of  things  unknown,  the  poet's  pen 
Turns  them  to  shapes,  and  gives  to  airy  nothing 
A  local  habitation  and  a  name. 

In   the   literature   of   America,    and 
indeed  throughout  that  of  the  English 
language,  you  will  be  at  pains  to  point 
[  220  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

out  utterances  more  illustrative  of  these 
lines — I  had  almost  said  more  definitive 
of  them — than  you  shall  find  in  the  tales 
and  the  poems  of  Poe  at  their  surviving 
best.  Momentarily  illusory  though  his 
concrete  touches  may  sometimes  make 
his  tales — and  he  possessed,  to  a  rare 
degree,  the  power  of  arousing  "that 
willing  suspension  of  disbelief  for  the 
moment  which  constitutes  poetic  faith" 
— the  substance  of  his  enduring  fan 
tasies  may  always  be  reduced  to  the 
forms  of  things  unknown,  bodied  forth 
by  sheer  power  of  imagination.  To 
these  airy  nothings  the  cunning  of  his 
pen,  turning  them  to  shapes,  gives  local 
habitations  and  names  so  distinct  and 
so  vivid  that  now  and  again  you  must 
be  loath  to  believe  them,  in  final  anal 
ysis,  substantially  unreal.  Yet  unreal 
they  always  prove  at  last,  phantas- 
mally  and  hauntingly  immaterial.  They 
[  221  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

are  like  figured  tapestries  spun  and 
woven,  warp  and  woof,  from  such  stuff 
as  dreams  are  made  of.  Only  the 
dreams  are  not  quite  our  own.  The 
dreamer  who  has  dreamed  them  is  the 
poet  who  has  woven  them  into  this  fab 
ric,  making  them  now  forever  ours  as 
well  as  his.  Without  his  own  inner 
most  life  they  could  never  have  come 
into  being  at  all.  Without  his  con 
summate  craftsmanship,  itself  almost 
a  miracle,  they  must  have  hovered  in 
visibly  beyond  the  range  of  all  other 
consciousness  than  his  who  dreamed 
them.  Dreamer  and  craftsman  alike, 
and  supreme,  it  is  he,  and  none  but  he, 
who  can  make  us  feel,  in  certain  most 
memorable  phases,  the  fascinating,  fan 
tastic,  elusive,  incessant  mystery  of  that 
which  must  forever  environ  human  con 
sciousness,  unseen,  unknown,  impalpa 
ble,  implacable,  undeniable. 
[  222  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

The  mood  we  are  thus  attempting 
to  define  is  bafflingly  elusive;  it  has  no 
precise  substance,  no  organic  or  articu 
late  form.  It  is  essentially  a  concept  not 
of  reason,  or  even  of  pervasive  human 
emotion,  but  only  of  poetry — a  subtly 
phantasmal  state  of  spirit,  evocable  only 
by  the  poet  who  has  been  endowed  with 
power  to  call  it  from  the  vasty  deep 
where,  except  for  him,  it  must  have 
lurked  in  secret  forever.  If  it  were  not 
unique,  it  could  not  be  itself;  for  it 
would  not  be  quite  his,  and  whatever 
is  not  quite  his  is  not  his  at  all.  So 
much  we  may  confidently  assert. 

If  we  should  permit  ourselves,  the 
while,  either  to  rest  with  the  assertion,  or 
to  stray  in  fancy  through  conclusion 
after  conclusion  toward  which  it  may 
have  seemed  to  lead  us,  we  should  remain 
or  wander  mischievously  far  from  the 
truth.  That  Poe's  imagination  was  soli- 
[  223  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

tary,  like  so  much  of  the  circumstance  of 
his  life,  we  need  not  deny  or  dispute. 
Clearly,  nevertheless,  he  lived  his  soli 
tary  life  not  in  some  fantastic  nowhere, 
but  amid  the  undeniably  recorded  reali 
ties  of  these  United  States  of  America 
during  the  first  half  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century.  It  is  equally  clear  that 
throughout  the  years  when  his  solitary 
poetic  imagination  was  giving  to  its 
airy  nothings  their  local  habitations  and 
their  names,  countless  other  poetic 
imaginations,  at  home  and  abroad, 
were  striving  to  do  likewise,  each  in  its 
own  way  and  fashion.  Solitary,  apart, 
almost  defiant  though  the  aspect  of 
Poe  may  have  seemed,  isolated  though 
we  may  still  find  the  records  of  his  life 
or  the  creatures  of  his  imagination,  he 
was  never  anachronistic.  Even  the 
visual  image  of  his  restless  presence, 
which  we  tried  to  call  up  a  little  while 
[  224  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

ago,  will  prove  on  scrutiny  not  only 
individual,  but  outwardly  cast  in  the 
form  and  the  habit  of  its  own  time — 
to  the  very  decade  and  year  of  the 
almanac.  With  his  dreams,  and  with 
the  magic  fabrics  into  which  he  wrought 
them,  the  case  is  much  the  same.  Nei 
ther  dreams  nor  fabrics,  any  more  than 
his  bodily  presence,  could  have  been 
quite  themselves — and  still  less  could 
the  dreams  and  the  fabrics  have  com 
bined  forever  in  their  wondrous  poetic 
harmonies  —  during  any  other  epoch 
than  that  wherein  Poe  lived  and  moved 
and  had  his  being. 

What  I  mean  must  soon  be  evident 
if  we  stop  to  seek  a  general  name  for 
the  kind  of  poetical  mood  which  Poe 
could  always  evoke  in  so  specific  a  form 
and  degree.  The  word  is  instantly  at 
hand,  inexact  and  canting  if  you  will, 
but  undeniable.  It  is  the  word  which 
[  225  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

his  contemporaries  might  carelessly, 
yet  not  untruly,  have  applied  to  his  per 
sonal  appearance,  alluring  to  the  eye 
if  only  for  the  quiet  defiance  of  his  tem 
peramental  solitude.  It  is  the  word  by 
which  we  might  most  fitly  have  char 
acterised  such  impulsive  curiosity  as 
should  have  impelled  us,  if  we  had  seen 
him,  to  inquire  who  this  mysterious- 
looking  stranger  might  be.  It  is  the 
word — misused,  teasing,  filmily  evasive 
— by  w^hich  we  are  still  apt  indefinitely 
to  define  the  general  aesthetic  temper 
of  his  time,  all  over  the  European  and 
American  world.  We  use  it  concern 
ing  every  manner  of  emotion  and 
of  conduct,  and  the  countless  phases 
of  literature  or  of  the  other  fine 
arts  throughout  their  whole  protean 
ranges  of  expression.  You  will  have 
guessed  already,  long  before  I  shall 
have  come  to  utter  it,  the  word  thus 
[  226  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

hovering  in  all  our  minds — the  word 
romantic. 

If  we  should  hereupon  attempt  for 
mally  to  define  what  this  familiar  word 
means,  there  would  be  no  hope  left  us. 
Turn,  as  widely  as  you  will,  to  dic 
tionaries,  to  encyclopaedias,  to  volumes, 
and  to  libraries  of  volumes.  Each  may 
throw  its  ray  of  light  on  the  matter; 
none  will  completely  illuminate  it  or 
irradiate.  You  might  as  well  seek 
words  which  should  comprehend,  in 
descriptive  finality,  the  full,  delicate, 
sensuous  truth  of  the  savour  of  a  fruit 
or  of  the  scent  of  a  flower.  Yet,  for  all 
this,  there  are  aspects  of  romanticism 
on  which  wre  may  helpfully  dwell;  and 
of  these  the  first  is  an  acknowledged 
matter  of  history.  Throughout  all 
parts  of  the  world  then  dominated  by 
European  tradition,  the  temper  of  the 
first  half  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  was 
[  227  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

predominantly  romantic.  This  was  no 
where  more  evident  than  in  the  sponta 
neous  outburst  of  poetry  which,  in  less 
than  twenty  years,  enriched  the  roll  of 
English  poets  with  the  names  of  Words 
worth,  Coleridge,  Shelley,  Keats,  By 
ron,  and  Scott.  Now  the  way  in  which 
this  period  of  poetry  was  lately  de 
scribed  in  an  American  announcement 
of  teaching  may  help  us  to  perceive, 
with  a  little  more  approach  to  preci 
sion,  one  feature  of  what  romanticism 
everywhere  means.  Some  worthy  pro 
fessor,  doubtless  chary  of  indefinite 
terms,  chose  to  describe  the  romantic 
poets  as  those  of  the  period  when  the 
individual  spirit  revived  in  English 
literature.  Poetic  or  not,  this  sound 
instructor  of  youth  was  historically 
right.  The  very  essence  of  romanti 
cism  lies  in  passionate  assertion  of  lit 
erary  or  artistic  individuality.  Where- 
[  228  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

fore,  as  we  can  now  begin  to  feel  sure, 
that  romantic  isolation  of  Poe's  has 
double  significance;  it  not  only  marks 
him,  apart  from  others,  as  individual, 
but  at  the  same  time  it  defines  him  as  an 
individual  of  his  own  romantic  period. 

We  shall  not  go  astray,  then,  if  we 
ponder  for  a  little  while  on  this  whole 
romantic  generation.  Before  long,  we 
may  contentfully  agree  that  the  indi 
vidualism  of  the  romantic  poets  re 
sulted  everywhere  from  their  passion 
ate  declaration  of  independence  from 
outworn  poetic  authority.  The  precise 
form  of  poetic  authority  from  which  they 
fervently  broke  free  was  the  pseudo- 
classic  tradition  of  the  Eighteenth  Cen 
tury — in  matters  literary  a  period  of 
formal  rhetorical  decency,  and  of  a 
cool  common-sense  which  had  little 
mercy  for  the  vagaries  of  uncontrolled 
aesthetic  emotion. 

[  229  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

Already  we  may  well  feel  insecure. 
We  are  straying,  beyond  peradven- 
ture,  into  dangerously  elusive  general 
isation,  interminably  debatable.  Yet, 
if  our  present  line  of  thought  is  to  lead 
us  anywhere,  we  must  not  hesitate 
to  generalise  more  boldly  still.  That 
same  Eighteenth  Century,  from  which 
romanticism  broke  free,  was  not  a 
sporadic  and  intrusive  episode  in  the 
history  of  European  culture;  it  was 
the  culmination  of  a  period  at  least  five 
hundred  years  long.  This  period  began 
when  the  reviving  critical  scholarship 
of  the  Renaissance  brought  back  to  the 
dominant  upper  consciousness  of  Eu 
rope  a  vivid  understanding  of  the  facts 
of  classical  antiquity;  and  when,  so 
doing,  it  began  to  suppress  the  vigorous 
and  splendid  body  of  intervening  tra 
dition  and  temper  to  which  we  have 
consequently  given  the  name  of  medi- 
[  230  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

seval.  In  matters  literary,  at  least,  the 
spirit  which  began  with  the  Renais 
sance  persisted  until  the  Revolution  of 
the  dying  Eighteenth  Century  prepared 
the  way  for  that  Nineteenth  Century, 
of  romantic  freedom,  wherein  Poe  lived 
and  did  his  living  work. 

Already  we  can  begin  to  see  that 
there  was  some  analogy  between  the 
Middle  Ages,  which  preceded  the  Re 
naissance,  and  the  epoch  of  romanti 
cism  which  ensued  after  the  Eighteenth 
Century.  Both  periods,  at  least,  were 
free — each  in  its  own  way — from  the 
intellectual  control  of  such  formal  clas 
sicism  or  pseudo-classicism  as  inter 
vened.  A  little  closer  scrutiny  of  the 
Middle  Ages  may  therefore  help  us  to 
appreciate  what  Nineteenth  Century 
romanticism  meant.  Throughout  that 
whole  mediaeval  period,  we  may  soon 
agree,  the  intellect  of  Europe  was 
[  231  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN   POE 

authoritatively  forbidden  to  exert  itself 
beyond  narrowly  fixed  and  rigid  lim 
its.  European  emotion,  meanwhile,  was 
permitted  vagrant  and  luxuriant  free 
dom  of  range  and  of  expression.  It 
might  wander  wherever  it  would. 

In  contrast  with  this  period,  we  can 
now  begin  to  see,  the  Renaissance  may 
be  conceived  as  an  intellectual  declara 
tion  of  independence;  and  through  a 
full  five  hundred  years,  the  intellect  of 
Europe  was  increasingly  free.  Its  very 
freedom  made  it,  in  turn,  tyrannical. 
At  least  in  the  matters  of  temper  and 
of  fashion,  it  repressed,  controlled, 
or  ignored  the  ranges  of  emotion 
which  had  flourished  during  its  sub 
jection.  In  literature  its  tyranny  ex 
tended  far  and  wide.  Though  for  a 
while  thought  was  permitted  to  range 
more  and  more  unfettered,  emotion 
was  at  best  sentimentalised.  So,  when 
[  232  ] 


EDCiAR   ALLAN    POK 

the  centuries  of  tyranny  were  past, 
poetry,  if  it  were  ever  to  regain  full 
freedom  of  emotional  existence,  if  it 
were  ever  to  enjoy  again  the  fine  fren/y 
of  creation,  needed  more  than  inde 
pendence.  To  revive  the  spirit  which 
should  vitally  reanimate  its  enfranchise 
ment  it  needed  to  drink  again  from  the 
fountains  for  which  it  had  thirsted  for 
hundreds  of  years;  it  must  revert  to 
something  like  the  unfettered  emotional 
freedom  of  the  Middle  Ages. 

To  put  the  case  a  little  more  dis 
tinctly,  the  romanticism  of  the  Nine 
teenth  Century  could  be  its  true  self 
only  when  to  the  intellectual  maturity 
developed  by  five  hundred  years  of  clas 
sical  culture  it  could  add  full  and  eager 
sympathy  with  the  tremendous  emotions 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  inevitably  arieeslnil 
to  all  modernity.  So  the  instinct  was 
profoundly  vital  which  directed  the  en- 
[  233  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

thusiasm  of  poets  to  mediaeval  themes 
and  traditions,  even  though  these  were 
imperfectly  understood.  The  inspira 
tion  derived  from  them  came  not  so 
much  from  any  detail  of  their  actual  his 
torical  circumstances  as  from  their  in 
stant,  obvious  remoteness  from  the  com 
mon-sense  facts  of  daily  experience — 
matters  judiciously  to  be  handled  only 
by  the  colourless  activity  of  intellect.  It 
was  remoteness  from  actuality,  above 
all  else,  which  made  romantic  your 
romantic  ruins  and  romantic  villains, 
your  romantic  heroines,  your  romantic 
passions,  and  your  romantic  aspira 
tions.  Yet  even  your  most  romantic 
poet  must  give  the  airy  nothings  of  his 
imagination  a  local  habitation  and  a 
name.  Unreal  and  fantastic  though 
they  might  be,  they  must  possess  at 
least  some  semblance  of  reality;  and 
this  semblance,  whether  bodily  or  spir- 
[  234  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

itual,    normally   assumed    a   mediaeval 
guise. 

Throughout  Europe  such  semblance 
could  always  be  guided,  controlled, 
and  regulated  by  the  pervasive  presence 
everywhere  of  relics,  material  or  tradi 
tional,  of  the  mediaeval  times  thus  at 
length  welcomed  back  to  the  light. 
So  far  as  the  full  romantic  literature  of 
Europe  deals  with  mediaeval  matters, 
accordingly,  or  so  far  as  intentionally 
or  instinctively  it  reverts  to  mediaeval 
temper,  it  has  a  kind  of  solidity  hardly 
to  be  found  in  the  poetic  utterance  of 
its  contemporary  America.  For,  at  the 
beginning  of  the  Nineteenth  Century, 
America  was  not  only  consciously  fur 
ther  than  Europe  from  all  the  common 
roots  of  our  ancestral  humanity;  it 
possessed  hardly  a  line  of  what  is  now 
accepted  as  our  national  literature.  As 
patriots  and  as  men  of  their  time,  the 
[  235  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

poets  of  America  were  called  on  to 
add  their  part  to  romantic  expression. 
To  give  their  expression  semblance  of 
reality  they  had  no  mediaeval  relics  to 
guide  them,  nor  enduring  local  tradi 
tions,  thick  and  strong  about  them. 
They  were  compelled  to  rely  on  sheer 
force  of  creative  imagination.  Preten 
tious  as  that  phrase  may  sound,  it  is 
animated  by  a  spirit  of  humility.  Its 
purpose  is  in  no  wise  to  claim  supe 
riority  for  the  romantic  literary  achieve 
ment  of  our  country.  It  is  rather,  by 
stating  the  magnitude  of  our  national 
task,  to  explain  our  comparative  lack  of 
robust  solidity,  and  to  indicate  why  the 
peculiar  note  of  our  country  must  in 
evitably  have  been  a  note  of  our  singu 
lar,  though  not  necessarily  of  powerful, 
creative  purity. 

Now  just  such  creative  purity  is  evi 
dently  characteristic  of  Poe.     It  may 
[  236  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

sometimes  have  seemed  that  among 
our  eminent  men  of  letters  he  is  the 
least  obviously  American.  A  little 
while  ago,  indeed,  when  I  again  turned 
through  all  the  pages  of  his  collected 
works,  I  was  freshly  surprised  to  find 
how  little  explicit  trace  they  bore  of  the 
precise  environment  where  they  were 
written.  Throughout  all  their  length, 
it  seemed,  there  was  not  a  single  com 
plete  page  on  which  a  stranger  might 
rest  proof  that  it  had  come  to  the  light 
in  this  country.  The  first  example 
which  occurs  to  me — it  happens  to  be 
also  the  most  generally  familiar — will 
show  you  what  I  have  in  mind:  the 
mysterious  chamber  where  the  Raven 
forces  uncanny  entrance  is  not  Ameri 
can.  The  image  of  it  originated,  per 
haps,  in  a  room  still  pointed  out.  Yet, 
so  far  as  the  atmosphere  of  it  is  con 
cerned,  that  room  might  have  been 
[  237  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

anywhere;  or  rather,  as  it  lives  far  and 
wide,  it  is  surely  nowhere.  Yet,  all  the 
while,  it  has  a  strange  semblance  of 
reality.  What  is  true  here  proves  true 
throughout.  The  Paris  of  Poe's  detec 
tive  stories  is  no  real  Paris;  the  House 
of  Usher  never  stood,  or  fell,  on  any 
earthly  continent;  Poe's  Maelstrom 
whirls  as  fantastic  as  the  balloon  or  the 
moon  of  Hans  Pfaal.  One  might  go  on 
unceasingly,  recalling  at  random  im 
pression  after  impression,  vivid  as  the 
most  vivid  of  dreams,  and  always  as 
impalpable.  There  is  nowhere  else 
romantic  fantasy  so  securely  remote 
from  all  constraining  taint  of  literal 
reality;  there  is  none  anywhere  more 
unconditioned  in  its  creative  freedom. 

Thus,  paradoxical  though  the  thought 

may    at    first    seem,    Poe   tacitly,    but 

clearly   and  triumphantly,  asserts    his 

nationality.    No  other  romanticism  of 

[   238  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

the  Nineteenth  Century  was  ever  so 
serenely  free  from  limitation  of  material 
condition  and  tradition;  none,  there 
fore,  was  so  indisputably  what  the 
native  romanticism  of  America  must 
inevitably  have  been.  Call  his  work 
significant,  if  you  like,  or  call  it  un 
meaning;  decide  that  it  is  true  or  false, 
as  you  will,  in  ethical  or  artistic  pur 
pose.  Nothing  can  alter  its  wondrous 
independence  of  all  but  deliberately 
accepted  artistic  limitations.  In  this 
supreme  artistic  purity  lies  not  only  the 
chief  secret  of  its  wide  appeal,  but  at 
the  same  time  the  subtle  trait  which 
marks  it  as  the  product  of  its  own  time, 
and  of  its  own  time  nowhere  else  than 
here  in  America,  our  common  country. 
American  though  Poke's  utterance 
be,  the  while,  it  stays  elusive.  When 
one  tries  to  group  it  with  any  other 
utterance  of  his  time,  one  feels  again 
[  239  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

and  afresh  the  impression  of  its  tem 
peramental  solitude.  This  solitude  is 
far  from  prophetic  or  austere;  it  is  as 
remote  as  possible  from  that  of  a  voice 
crying  in  the  wilderness.  Nor  indeed 
was  America,  in  Poe's  time,  any  longer 
a  wilderness  wherein  a  poet  should  seem 
a  stranger.  Even  though  when  the 
Nineteenth  Century  began  there  was 
hardly  such  a  thing  as  literature  in 
America,  the  years  of  Poe's  life  brought 
us  rather  copiousness  than  dearth  of 
national  expression.  As  a  New  Eng- 
lander,  for  example,  I  may  perhaps  be 
pardoned  for  reminding  you  that  in  the 
year  1830  Boston  could  not  have  shown 
you  a  single  recognized  volume  to  dem 
onstrate  that  it  was  ever  to  be  a  centre 
of  purely  literary  importance.  Twenty 
years  later,  when  Poe  died,  the  region 
of  Boston  had  already  produced,  in  pure 
literature,  the  fully  developed  charac- 
[  240  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

ters,  though  not  yet  the  complete  and 
rounded  work,  of  Emerson,  and  Long 
fellow,  and  Lowell,  and  Holmes,  and 
Whittier,  and  Hawthorne. 

For  the  moment,  I  call  this  group  to 
mind  only  that  we  may  more  clearly  per 
ceive  the  peculiar  individuality  of  Poe. 
In  many  aspects,  each  of  the  New  Eng 
land  group  was  individual,  enough  and 
to  spare ;  nobody  who  ever  knew  them 
could  long  confuse  one  with  another. 
Yet  individual  though  they  were,  none 
of  them  ever  seems  quite  solitary  or 
isolated.  You  rarely  think  of  any 
among  them  as  standing  apart  from 
the  rest,  nor  yet  from  the  historical,  the 
social,  the  religious  or  the  philosophic 
conditions  which  brought  them  all  to 
the  point  of  poetic  utterance.  Now  Poe 
was  in  every  sense  their  contemporary ; 
yet  the  moment  you  gladly  yield  your 
self  to  the  contagion  of  his  poetic  sym- 
[  241  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

pathy,  you  find  yourself  alone  with  him 
— aesthetically  solitary.  You  might 
fancy  yourself  for  the  while  fantasti 
cally  disembodied — a  waking  wanderer 
in  some  region  of  unalloyed  dreams. 
American  though  he  be,  beyond  any 
question,  and  a  man  of  his  time  as  well, 
he  proves,  beyond  all  other  Americans 
throughout  the  growingly  illustrious  roll 
of  our  national  letters,  immune  from 
imprisonment  within  any  classifying 
formula  which  should  surely  include  any 
other  than  his  own  haunting  and  fas 
cinating  self. 

This  isolation  might  at  first  seem  a 
token  of  weakness.  Enchanting  as  the 
fascination  of  Poe  must  forever  be — 
even  to  those  who  strive  to  resist  it  and 
give  us  dozens  of  wise  pages  to  prove 
him  undeserving  of  such  attention — 
the  most  ardent  of  his  admirers  can 
hardly  maintain  his  work  to  be  domi- 
[  242  ] 


EDGAR   ALLAN   POE 

nant  or  commanding.  Except  for  the 
pleasure  it  gives  you,  it  leaves  you  little 
moved;  it  does  not  meddle  with  your 
philosophy,  or  modify  your  rules  of 
conduct.  Its  power  lies  altogether  in 
the  strange  excellence  of  its  peculiar 
beauty;  and  even  though  the  most 
ethical  poet  of  his  contemporary  New 
England  has  immortally  assured  us  that 
beauty  is  its  own  excuse  for  being,  we 
can  hardly  forget  that  Emerson's  apho 
rism  sprang  from  contemplation  of  a 
wild  flower,  in  the  exquisite  perfection 
of  ephemeral  fragility.  A  slight  thing 
some  might  thus  come  to  fancy  the 
isolated  work  of  Poe — the  poet  of  Nine 
teenth  Century  America  whose  spirit 
hovered  most  persistently  remote  from 
actuality. 

If  such  mood  should  threaten  to 
possess  us,  even  for  a  little  while,  the 
concourse  here  gathered  together  should 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

surely  set  us  free.  That  spirit  which 
hovered  aloof  sixty  and  seventy  years 
ago  is  hovering  still.  It  shall  hover,  we 
can  now  confidently  assert,  through 
centuries  unending.  The  solitude  of 
weakness,  or  of  fragility,  is  no  such 
solitude  as  this;  weak  and  fragile  soli 
tude  vanishes  with  its  earthly  self,  leav 
ing  no  void  behind.  Solitude  which 
persists  as  Poe's  is  persisting  proves  it 
self  by  the  very  tenacity  of  its  persist 
ence  to  be  the  solitude  of  unflagging  and 
independent  strength.  Such  strength 
as  this  is  sure  token  of  poetic  greatness. 
We  may  grow  more  confident  than 
ever.  We  may  unhesitatingly  assert 
Poe  not  only  American,  but  great. 

So  we  come  to  one  further  ques 
tion,  nearer  to  us,  as  fellow-country 
men,  than  those  on  which  we  have 
touched  before.  It  is  the  question  of 
just  where  the  enduring  work  of  this 
[  244  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

great  American  poet  should  be  placed 
in  the  temperamental  history  of  our 
country — of  just  what  phase  it  may  be 
held  to  express  of  the  national  spirit  of 
America. 

That  national  spirit — the  spirit  which 
animates  and  inspires  the  life  of  our 
native  land — has  had  a  solemn  and  a 
tragic  history.  From  the  very  begin 
ning  of  our  national  growth,  historic 
circumstance  at  once  prevented  any 
spiritual  centralisation  of  our  national 
life,  and  encouraged  in  diverse  regions, 
equally  essential  to  the  completeness 
of  our  national  existence,  separate 
spiritual  centres,  each  true  to  itself  and 
for  that  very  reason  defiant  of  others. 
So  far  as  the  separate  phases  of  our  na 
tional  spirit  have  ever  been  able  to  meet 
one  another  open-hearted,  they  have 
marvelled  to  know  the  true  depth  of 
their  communion.  Open-hearted  meet- 
[  245  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

ing,  however,  has  rarely  been  possible; 
and  throughout  the  Nineteenth  Century 
— the  century  in  which  Poe  lived  and 
wrought — it  was  hardjy  possible  at  all. 
Americans  were  brethren,  as  they  were 
brethren  before,  as  they  are  brethren 
now,  as  they  shall  stay  brethren,  God 
willing,  through  centuries  to  come.  For 
the  while,  however,  their  brotherhood 
was  sadly  turbulent.  They  believed 
that  they  spoke  a  common  language. 
The  accents  of  it  sounded  familiar 
to  the  ears  of  all.  Yet  the  meanings 
which  those  accents  were  bidden  to 
carry  seemed  writhed  into  distortion 
on  their  way  to  the  very  ears  which 
were  straining  to  catch  them.  It  was 
an  epoch,  we  must  sadly  grant,  of  a 
Babel  of  the  spirit. 

So,  throughout  Poe's  time,  there  was 
hardly  one  among  the  many  whom  the 
time  held  greater  than  he  to  whose  voice 
[  246  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  FOE 

the  united  spirit  of  our  country  could 
ever  unhesitatingly  and  harmoniously 
respond.  What  I  have  in  mind  may 
well  have  occurred  to  you,  of  Virginia, 
when  a  little  while  ago  I  named  the  six 
chief  literary  worthies  of  New  England 
in  the  Nineteenth  Century.  They  were 
contemporaries  of  Poe.  They  were 
honest  men  and  faithful  poets.  They 
never  hesitated  to  utter,  with  all  their 
hearts,  what  they  devotedly  believed  to 
be  the  truth.  Every  one  of  them,  too, 
was  immemorially  American.  Not  one 
of  them  cherished  any  ancestral  tradi 
tion  but  was  native  to  this  country, 
since  the  far-off  days  of  King  Charles 
the  First.  In  every  one  of  them,  accord 
ingly,  any  American — North  or  South, 
East  or  West — must  surely  find  utter 
ances  heroically  true  to  the  idealism 
ancestrally  and  peculiarly  our  own. 
Yet  it  would  be  mischievous  folly  to 
[  247  ] 


EDGAR   ALLAN   POE 

pretend  that  such  utterances,  speaking 
for  us  all,  can  ever  tell  the  whole  story 
of  the  New  England  poets.  They  were 
not  only  Americans,  as  we  all  are ;  they 
were  Americans  of  Nineteenth  Century 
New  England.  As  such  they  could  not 
have  been  the  honest  men  they  were  if 
they  had  failed  to  concern  themselves 
passionately  with  the  irrepressible  dis 
putes  and  conflicts  of  their  tragic  times. 
They  could  not  so  concern  themselves 
without  utterance  after  utterance  fatally 
sure  to  provoke  passionate  response,  or 
passionate  revulsion  in  fellow-country 
men  of  traditions  other  than  their  own. 
Even  this  sad  truth  hardly  includes 
the  limitation  of  their  localism.  Turn 
to  their  quieter  passages,  descriptive  or 
gently  anecdotic.  Strong,  simple,  sin 
cere,  admirable  though  these  be,  they  are 
excellent,  we  must  freely  grant,  chiefly 
because  they  could  have  been  made  no- 
[  248  ] 


EDGAR   ALLAN  POE 

where  else  than  just  where  they  were. 
In  New  England,  for  example,  there 
was  never  a  native  human  being  who 
could  fail  to  recognise  that  "Snow 
Bound  '  was  a  genuine  utterance 
straight  from  the  stout  heart  of  his  own 
people ;  nor  yet  one,  I  believe,  who,  smile 
though  he  might  at  his  own  sentimental 
ity,  could  resist  the  appeal  of  the  "Vil 
lage  Blacksmith."  We  may  well  doubt, 
however,  whether  any  Southern  reader, 
in  those  old  times,  could  have  helped 
feeling  that  these  verses — as  surely  as 
those  of  Burns,  let  us  say,  or  of  Words 
worth — came  from  other  regions  than 
those  familiar  to  his  daily  life. 

The  literature  of  New  England,  in 
brief,  American  though  we  may  all 
gladly  assert  it  in  its  nobler  phases,  is, 
first  of  all,  not  American  or  national, 
but  local.  What  is  thus  true  of  New 
England  is  generally  true,  I  believe,  of 
[  249  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN   POE 

literary  expression  throughout  America. 
Turn,  if  you  will,  to  the  two  memorable 
writers  of  New  York  during  the  first 
quarter  of  the  Nineteenth  Century — 
Washington  Irving  and  James  Feni- 
more  Cooper.  They  were  good  men, 
and  honest  men  of  letters,  and  admira 
ble  story-tellers.  Neither  of  them,  how 
ever,  wasted  any  love  on  his  neighbours 
a  little  to  the  eastward ;  both  hated  the 
unwinsome  surface  of  decadent  Puri 
tanism;  and  neither  understood  the 
mystic  fervour  of  the  Puritan  spirit. 
So,  even  to  this  day,  a  sensitive  reader 
in  New  England  will  now  and  again 
discover,  in  Irving  or  in  Cooper,  pas 
sages  or  turns  of  phrase  which  shall  still 
set  his  blood  faintly  tingling  with  re 
sentment.  Whatever  the  positive  merit, 
whatever  the  sturdy  honesty  of  most 
American  expression  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century,  it  lacked  conciliatory  breadth 
[  250  ] 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

of  feeling.  Its  intensity  of  localism 
marks  it,  whatever  the  peacefulness  of 
its  outward  guise,  as  the  utterance  of  a 
fatally  discordant  time. 

Now  it  is  from  this  same  discordant 
time  that  the  works  of  Poe  have  come 
down  to  us;  and  no  work  could  have 
been  much  less  inspired  by  the  local 
traditions  and  temper  of  New  Eng 
land.  To  his  vagrant  and  solitary 
spirit,  indeed,  those  traditions  must 
have  been  abhorrent.  New  England 
people,  too,  would  probably  have  liked 
him  as  little  as  he  liked  them.  You 
might  well  expect  that  even  now,  when 
the  younger  generations  of  New  Eng 
land  turn  to  his  tales  or  his  poems, 
sparks  of  resentment  might  begin  to 
rekindle.  In  one  sense,  perhaps,  they 
may  seem  to;  for  Poe's  individuality  is 
too  intense  for  universal  appeal.  You 
will  find  readers  in  New  England  just 


EDGAR   ALLAN    POE 

as  you  will  find  readers  elsewhere,  who 
stay  deaf  to  the  haunting  music  of 
his  verse  and  blind  to  the  wreathing 
films  of  his  unearthly  fantasy.  Such 
lack  of  sympathy,  however,  you  will 
never  find  to  be  a  matter  of  ancestral 
tradition  or  of  local  prejudice  or  of 
any  sectional  limitation;  it  will  prove 
wholly  and  unconditionally  to  be  a 
matter  only  of  individual  tempera 
ment.  Among  the  enduring  writers 
of  Nineteenth  Century  America,  Poe 
stands  unique. 

Inevitably  of  his  country  and  of  his 
time,  he  eludes  all  limitation  of  more 
narrow  scope  or  circumstance.  Of  all, 
I  believe,  he  is  the  only  one  to  whom, 
in  his  own  day,  all  America  might  con 
fidently  have  turned,  as  all  America 
may  confidently  turn  still,  and  forever, 
with  certainty  of  finding  no  line,  no 
word,  no  quiver  of  thought  or  of  feeling 
[  252  ] 


EDGAR   ALLAN   POE 

which  should  arouse  or  revive  the  con 
sciousness  or  the  memory  of  our  tragic 
national  discords,  now  happily  for  all 
alike  heroic  matters  of  the  past.  The 
more  we  dwell  on  the  enduring  work 
of  this  great  American  poet,  the  more 
clearly  this  virtue  of  it  must  shine  be 
fore  us  all.  In  the  temperamental  his 
tory  of  our  country,  it  is  he,  and  he 
alone,  as  yet,  who  is  not  local  but  surely, 
enduringly  national. 

As  I  thus  grow  to  reverence  in  him 
a  wondrous  harbinger  of  American 
spiritual  reunion,  I  find  hovering  in 
my  fancy  some  lines  of  his  which,  once 
heard,  can  never  be  quite  forgotten. 
To  him,  I  believe,  they  must  have 
seemed  only  a  thing  of  beauty.  He 
would  have  been  impatient  of  the  sug 
gestion  that  any  one  should  ever  read 
into  them  the  prose  of  deeper  signifi 
cance.  It  was  song,  and  only  song, 
\  253  1 


EDGAR  ALLAN  POE 

which  possessed   him  when   he  wrote 
the  words : 

If  I  could  dwell 
Where  Israfel 

Hath  dwelt,  and  he  where  I, 
He  might  not  sing  so  wildly  well 

A  mortal  melody, 
While  a  bolder  note  than  this  might  swell 

From  my  lyre  within  the  sky. 

Is  it  too  much  to  fancy,  nevertheless, 
that  to-day  we  can  hear  that  bolder 
note  swelling  about  us  as  we  meet  here 
in  communion  ?  None  could  be  purer, 
none  more  sweet;  and,  beyond  the 
shadow  of  a  doubt,  none  could  more 
serenely  help  to  resolve  the  discords  of 
his  fellow-countrymen  into  their  final 
harmony. 


[  254 


VI 
DE    PRESIDE     MAGNIFICO 

A   Poem   delivered   before   the   Phi    Beta   Kappa 

Society  of  Harvard  College,  July  1,  1909. 

First  printed  in  the  "Harvard  Graduates'  Magazine'* 

for  September,  1909. 


VI 
DE  PRESIDE  MAGNIFICO 


alone,  long  first  amid  the  peers 
Who  cluster  thickening  through  the  swift-  winged  years, 
Our  college,  rich  with  memories  all  our  own, 
Must  ever  stay  for  us  the  first  alone. 
For,  while  the  sunlight  gleams  about  us  still, 
Even  though  the  shadows  hover,  as  they  will, 
Nearer  and  nearer,  all  our  bright  array 
Of  yesterdays  forever  yesterday 
Can  never  fade,  so  radiant  must  be 
The  magic  of  their  diuturnity 

One  seems  like  yesterday  indeed,  although 
They  tell  us  it  was  forty  years  ago 
When  we  awoke  to  see  the  June  sun  shine 
On  Class  Day  for  the  Class  of  Sixty-nine. 
Seniors,  resplendent  in  their  white  cravats, 
Their  black  dress-clothes,  their  glossy  beaver  hats, 
Heard  Francis  Peabody,  a  godly  youth, 
Proclaim  in  church  the  sanctity  of  truth; 

I  257   ] 


DE   PRESIDE   MAGNIFICO 

While  Bowditch,  fair-moustached,  and  slight  of  girth, 

As  Marshal  was  the  dearest  thing  on  earth — 

This  was  the  whispered  comment  of  a  girl, 

With  waterfall  and  pretty,  dangling  curl. 

And  Fiske,  suppressing  evident  alarms, 

Heard  wavering  voices  chant  his  Ode's  endearing  charms. 

To  youngsters  then  all  Harvard  seemed  a  dream 
Of  dignity  and  strawberries  and  cream. 
To  elder  folks,  who  knows  ?     They  bear  the  stars 
Who  bore  the  burden  then,  and  little  mars 
Their  distant  purity.    One  to  survive — 
A  Sophomore  in  Seventeen  Ninety-five — 
Had  watched  our  college  wax  and  wane  until 
The  blameless  days  of  guileless  Thomas  Hill; 
Willard  and  Webber  were  of  those  he  knew. 
And  Kirkland  hobbled  still,  almost  in  view 
Of  half-closed  eyes;  and  Quincy,  marble  now, 
Seemed  breathing,  with  his  tall,  Olympian  brow; 
Like  Everett,  who  had  given  to  every  place 
Honour  could  lavish  new,  peculiar  grace. 
And  when  a  graduate  rose  to  make  remarks, 
Likely  as  not,  he  would  touch  on  Jared  Sparks, 
Or  mention,  as  if  still  enthralled  thereby, 
That  shrewd  old  Walker's  wisely  twinkling  eye; 
And  Felton's  wit  had  hardly  ceased  to  speak 
The  bright  humanity  of  human  Greek 
[   258   ] 


DE   PRESIDE   MAGNIFICO 

These  were  the  presidents  they  knew,  and  there 
Before  them  Parson  Turell's  empty  chair 
Awaited,  as  it  need  no  more  await, 
One  who  should  sit  therein  securely  great. 

Securely  great  we  know  him  now,  and  they 
Who,  doubtful  then,  bear  on  the  stars  to-day 
Shining  before  us,  came  to  know  him  so 
Before  they  went  the  way  we  all  must  go. 
For  he  has  conquered  doubt,  perplexity, 
Misunderstanding;   he  has  lived  to  see 
Ten  college  generations,  in  acclaim 
Harmonious,  greet  the  honour  of  his  name. 
Not  all  at  once :  he  heard  his  call  to  strife 
Just  mid-way  in  the  journey  of  our  life — 
An  age  held  boyish  nowadays — and  he 
Kept  his  own  counsel  perseveringly. 
His  elders  brought  him  wisdom's  treasured  lore; 
His  mates — if  mates  there  were — were  even  more 
Prone  to  advise,  with  inexperience 
Masked  in  the  sturdy  guise  of  common-sense; 
And  students,  thronging  hither  year  by  year, 
Clamored  to  keep  what  always  had  been  here. 
He  listened  patiently  to  all,  to  all 
Gave  what  he  deemed  their  due,  and  therewithal 
Went  his  own  way  serene.    Election 
He  held,  almost  with  Calvin,  was  the  one 
[   259   ] 


Wu  A  ialv 

Itoyf  >  i 

Y«*t 

Wit  IK 

Ail 

t80 

In  f 

lltic 

Wot 

wag 

VVh 

you  i 

To 

Ithe 

At< 

with 

He 

>ve  ti 

Am 

us  t 

For 

:ho 

Ho, 

DUgfi 

Urn 

bys 

Pat 

He 

No 

Fro 

To 

lie- 

Tlu 

IM 

Of 

H    - 

Heseei 

h  ur>: 
\  ou  :. 
To  be: 
Be  iff 
HCE 
Bern 
Bu; 
•fc 


DE  PRESIDE   MAGNIFICO 

For  what  he  held  the  truth,  he  has  persevered 
Saintly  in  fervid  faith,  when  others  feared, 
Fully  assured,  when  others  doubted  still, 
That  human  good  surpasses  human  ill. 
So,  would  you  know  his  mission,  and  the  need 
He  has  fulfilled,  recall  that  grisly  creed 
The  reverent  Pilgrim  Fathers  trembling  bore 
From  sinful  Europe  to  our  desert  shore. 
Calvin  had  taught  them  in  their  earlier  home, 
As  grim  Augustine  taught  imperial  Rome, 
How  God  disdained,  with  justly  deathless  wrath, 
The  seed  of  Adam  scattered  by  the  path 
Where  they  must  totter  on  and  still  revere 
His  majesty  in  consecrated  fear. 
Their  lives  were  simple,  and  their  manners  stern; 
They  tried  to  do  God's  will;   their  sons,  in  turn; 
Their  children's  children,  too — unwitting  race 
Of  chosen  vessels  of  abounding  grace. 
Then,  when  men's  wondering  eyes  began  to  see 
In  man  the  image  of  divinity, 
And  so  their  primal  faith  could  almost  seem 
Phantasmagoric,  like  an  evil  dream, 
Unflinching  Edwards,  heedless  of  the  time, 
Rose  with  his  logic,  terribly  sublime, 
Revived  the  might  of  Calvin's  drooping  God, 
And  kept  them  in  the  ways  their  fathers  trod. 
[   262   ] 


DE   PRESIDE   MAGNIFICO 

Supreme  awhile,  ere  long  his  fiery  glow 
Proved  that  of  Calvin's  sunset  here  below; 
For  when  our  nation  breathed  its  morning  air, 
Thrilled  with  the  glories  gleaming  everywhere, 
Ethereal  Channing,  staid  New  England  saint, 
Born  to  an  age  still  pure  of  foreign  taint, 
Surveyed  mankind  with  the  benignant  eye 
Of  Unitarian  divinity. 

His  was  the  voice  of  promise;   his  white  flame 
Made  our  new  world  irradiate — the  same 
In  purity,  in  buoyant  hope  at  last 
Freed  from  the  sombre  phantoms  of  the  past. 
So,  for  a  while,  the  future  seemed  secure, 
Dejection  folly,  aspiration  sure. 

But  changeless  change  has  brought  us  gloomier  times — 
Old-world  corruption,  world-old  human  crimes, 
Greed,  lust  and  villainy — a  world  wherein 
Man  crawls  again,  laden  with  mortal  sin. 
Was  Channing,  then,  only  a  dreamer,  too, 
Of  lovelier  dreams  than  elder  dreamers  knew  ? 
Some  faint  hearts  deem  so ;  but  one  clarion  voice 
Through  forty  years  has  bid  us  all  "Rejoice! 
What  though  this  world  look  worse  than  Channing  taught  ? 
Pierce  through  its  surface  with  the  darts  of  thought, 
And  virtue  rooted  there  shall  prove  you  still 
How  human  good  surpasses  human  ill!'* 

[   263   ] 


DE   PRESIDE   MAGNIFICO 

As  Edwards,  holding  Channing's  precepts  true, 
Preached  them  to  practice,  made  them  live  anew, 
So  Eliot  now  asserts  our  happier  state, 
Edwards  of  Channing — each  securely  great. 

In  all  his  strength  he  lays  his  burden  down, 
Serene  in  faith  that  future  years  shall  crown 
His  labours  to  their  end.    Another  face 
Shall  henceforth  fill  his  long-accustomed  place; 
And  Lowell's  buoyant  coming  lays  all  fears 
For  Harvard  in  her  new,  increasing  years. 
Sprung  from  a  steadfast  race  whose  virtues  shine 
Clear  on  our  starry  rolls,  the  sixth  in  line 
Father  to  son,  his  words  and  deeds  foretell 
Bold  words  to  come  and  deeds  done  bravely  well. 
So  heralded,  wherever  he  has  shown 
His  presence,  there  already  he  is  known 
Clear-eyed,  clear-voiced,  pure-hearted — augury 
That  as  he  is,  so  he  shall  always  be 
Sure  of  our  hearts.    He  cannot  rise  above 
The  sweet  reality  of  human  love. 


264   ] 


, 

OVERDUE  *'-00    ON    THE    SEVE^0"*™ 

ENTH     DAY 


LD  21-95TO.7>.37 


